Hokusai’s complete Fuji series finds hope beyond the Great Wave

Dulwich Picture Gallery is showing the complete Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji by Katsushika Hokusai, the first exhibition of the full series in Britain. The review argues that Mount Fuji, rather than the famous wave in The Great Wave, is the prints’ enduring subject: it offers a steady point of hope amid human danger and life’s passing turmoil.

The exhibition includes three impressions of The Great Wave, alongside scenes of people crossing rivers, working and travelling in search of views of the mountain. Hokusai created the series in the early 1830s, using striking shifts in perspective and Prussian blue, a pigment that came from Europe. The review describes the work as a landmark in landscape art and a major influence on modernism.