Observing and sublimating the landscape
Hokusai’s interest in the landscape echoed that of his contemporaries for famous sites (meisho). During the Edo period, Japanese lords travelled regularly between their lands and the capital. The working classes also travelled for work or during major religious pilgrimages, particularly to Ise. A culture of travel and a taste for exploring the country gradually developed.
The craze for illustrated guides to famous places offered ukiyo-e artists a platform for expression, as did the spread of Chinese garden manuals, valuable guides for creating landscapes. During the Kyōwa-Bunka era (1801-1818), Hokusai was one of the few artists to make landscape the main subject of a print. He drew a considerable number of famous places and was keen to capture the “outer road” (Tōkaidō) and its stations or resting points linking Edo, the shogunal residence, to Kyōto, the seat of the emperor, which he himself travelled in 1812.
For Japanese artists, the depiction of a landscape was traditionally the fruit of the imagination or the interpretation of an already established iconography, often Chinese. Faithful to this approach, Hokusai produced many landscapes without ever having seen them. But his extreme inventiveness made him the initiator of a new genre. Sublimating the landscape, he rendered the seasons, their changes, and the shifts in light throughout the day. He took a sensitive interest in everything around him and questioned humankind’s relationship with nature. A field of artistic experimentation, the landscape genre was primarily for him, an expression of his desire to understand the world in order to capture the energy animating it.
He also adopted new techniques from Western painting, such as linear perspective and shading, which he applied to his landscape prints, but also his drawing manuals, as may be seen in the seventh volume of his Manga.
At the age of seventy-two, Hokusai devoted himself fully, almost obsessively, to landscapes, making Mount Fuji the subject of his research for a new series, Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. He magnified the sacred mountain through the use of large formats and simplified compositions with innovative framing techniques, as well as the use of a modest colour range dominated by Prussian blue. The landscape, the main subject, sometimes gave way to genre scenes depicting the daily lives of his contemporaries in a sensitive and compassionate way. This masterful series was followed by those on waterfalls and bridges, establishing Hokusai as a master of landscapes. “Hokusai indulges in a meditation on life, eternity, storms, space, visible and invisible things, trompe-l’oeil, the relationships between humankind and nature, all that we do not see at first glance and which the spirit must come to illuminate.” Nelly Delay, One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, Hazan, 2008.