The first book to focus exclusively on Hokusai's landscapes, by one of
the world's leading ukiyo-e specialists
The best known of all Japanese artists, Katsushika Hokusai was active as
a painter, book illustrator and print designer throughout his 90-year
lifespan. Yet his most famous works--the color woodblock landscape
prints issued in series--were produced within a relatively short time,
in an amazing burst of creative energy that lasted from about 1830 to
1836.
Hokusai's landscapes revolutionized Japanese printmaking and became
icons of world art within a few decades of the artist's death.
Hokusai's Landscapes focuses exclusively on this pivotal body of the
artist's work, the first book to do so. Featuring stunning color
reproductions of works from the incomparable Japanese art collection at
the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (the largest collection of Japanese
prints outside Japan), Hokusai's Landscapes examines the magnetic
appeal of Hokusai's designs and the circumstances of their creation.
The book includes all published prints of the artist's eight major
landscape series: Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (1830-32), A Tour of
Waterfalls in Various Provinces (1833-34), Snow, Moon and Flowers
(1833), Eight Views of the Ryukyu Islands (1832-33), One Thousand
Pictures of the Ocean (1832-33), Remarkable Views of Bridges in
Various Provinces (1834), A True Mirror of Chinese and Japanese
Poetry (1833) and One Hundred Poems Explained by the Nurse (1835).
Working prolifically in the years just before Japan opened to the West
in 1853, Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) was the first Japanese
artist to be internationally recognized. His cleverly composed ukiyo-e
prints of everyday life and the landscapes of Edo Japan arrived in a
19th-century Europe gripped by Japonisme-mania, where they influenced
artists such as Degas, Gauguin, Manet and Van Gogh.
