Hiroshige 36 Views of Mt Fuji 1852

Utagawa Hiroshige’s two Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji series, 1852 and 1858 are both a copy act and in themselves innovative artistic endeavors. Katsushika Hokusai published his famous series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji in 1830-1832 and it influenced Hiroshige tremendously to his own series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji series 1852 which we deal with here.It is in the same horizontal format for landscapes that Hokusai used. In a subsequent series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji published in 1858 Hiroshige shifted to the vertical portrait format with novel and interesting results. We deal with that in a separate volume.It is possible to travel to see the same sites today and enjoy the views of Mt Fuji, which is still very important to the Japanese.Utagawa Hiroshige (in Japanese: 歌川 広重), also called Andō Hiroshige (in Japanese: 安藤 広重;), was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist, considered the last great master of that tradition. He was born 1797 and died 12 October 1858.Ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese art which flourished from the 17th through 19th centuries. Its artists produced woodblock prints and paintings of such subjects as female beauties; kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers; scenes from history and folk tales; travel scenes and landscapes; flora and fauna; and erotica. The term ukiyo-e (浮世絵) translates as 'picture[s] of the floating world'.Hiroshige is best known for his horizontal-format landscape series The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, and for his vertical-format landscape series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo and for instance the 69 Stations of the Nakasendō. The main subjects of his work are considered atypical of the ukiyo-e genre, whose focus was more on beautiful women, popular actors, and other scenes of the urban pleasure districts of Japan’s Edo period (1603-1868).  3