This richly colored print from Katsushika Hokusai's renowned series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji explores the majestic mountain's continually changing relationship to light, weather, and the seasons. The charm of this print derives partly from its simple but striking composition: Fuji's symmetrical shape, placed off center to the right, is balanced by the intricate, lilting cloud patterns on the left. Although Hokusai's copious sketchbooks reveal his wide-ranging visual interests, he and his contemporaries were best known for perfecting the poetic landscape print. Hokusai's studies of Mount Fuji, with their unorthodox perspective, stylized forms, and saturated color, inspired the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters working in late 19th-century Europe. The idea of studying the effects of various atmospheric conditions on a single motif may have inspired Claude Monet to create his series of haystacks, waterlilies, and London bridges.

Hokusai's output was prodigious and his fame widespread, but to the end of his life he lived in poverty. He said, "From the age of six I had a penchant for copying the form of things, and from about fifty, my pictures were frequently published, but until the age of seventy, nothing that I drew was worthy of notice." Hokusai was in his seventies when he made this print.

[After lunch] we could go see the Japanese prints at the Beaux-Arts. Seriously, you must not miss that. You who want to make color prints, you couldn't dream of anything more beautiful.
-Painter Mary Cassatt to fellow artist Berthe Morisot, 1890