Why Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji has forty-six prints in it

Fugaku Sanjūrokkei — Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji — contains forty-six prints. The number in the title is wrong, and the reason is commercial.

What happened

Hokusai began the series around 1830, published by Nishimuraya Yohachi. It sold extremely well. So the publisher commissioned ten more sheets and kept the title, because the title was the brand.

The ten additions are known as the ura — the “back” or “reverse” views. And there is a simple visual tell: the original thirty-six are printed with a blue key block; the ten extras use black.

The key block is the one that carries the drawing — all the outlines. In the first thirty-six, Hokusai and his printers outlined everything in Prussian blue, which is part of why the series looks the way it does: there is no hard black line anywhere, and the whole sheet sits in a blue register. For the extra ten they switched to a conventional black key. Once you know, you can sort any impression into one group or the other in a second.

The series is not really about Fuji

It is about people not looking at Fuji.

In Ejiri in Suruga Province a gust tears papers and hats out of travellers’ hands on an exposed road; Fuji sits quietly behind, ignored by everyone. In Fine Wind, Clear Morning — usually called Red Fuji — there are no people at all and the mountain fills the sheet. In Misaka Pass in Kai Province the mountain appears twice: once above the tree line and once reflected in the lake, and the reflection is snow-capped while the real one is not, which is either an error or a joke and has been argued about for two centuries. In the wave, Fuji is a small triangle that most viewers never notice.

Hokusai was in his seventies. He had been working for fifty years and had another decade to go. He signed several sheets in this series with a line meaning roughly “from the brush of Hokusai, changing his name to Iitsu” — he changed his artistic name more than thirty times in his life, and the name on a print is one way scholars date it.

What a woodblock print actually is

Not a painting, and not a reproduction of a painting. It is a collaborative manufactured object with four people in it:

1. The artist supplies a brush drawing.
2. The block cutter pastes that drawing face-down onto cherry wood and cuts away everything that is not a line — destroying the original drawing in the process. Almost no Hokusai preparatory drawings for these survive, because they were consumed by the cutting.
3. The printer inks each block by hand and rubs the paper against it with a baren, one colour per block, aligning each by notched registration marks called kentō. Ten colours means ten passes.
4. The publisher paid for all of it, owned the blocks, and decided what got made.

The printer had real interpretive latitude. Bokashi — the graded wipe that makes a sky darken towards the top — is done by hand with a cloth on the block, differently every impression. Two prints from the same blocks are genuinely not identical.

Early and late impressions

Cherry wood wears. Early impressions show crisp, fine outlines and clean gradation; late ones have thicker, softer lines, flatter colour, and sometimes visible misregistration. Blocks were also recut when they wore out, and later publishers reissued the series from new blocks well into the twentieth century.

So “an original Hokusai” spans everything from a superb 1831 impression worth a great deal to a 1900s reissue worth relatively little — which is why museum labels are so specific about it, and why a seller who will not say what they are selling is telling you something.

What we print, and from what

We do not sell original impressions. We sell archival prints made from the full-resolution scans that the Library of Congress and other public institutions publish of original impressions they hold — named on every product page, with the archive record linked.

Twenty-four sheets are in the Japanese woodblock collection, and the Great Wave has its own page with a close reading of what is actually in it. The gallery wall builder is worth a minute if you are considering three of them in matching frames — the series was designed to be seen together, and it shows.