Hokusai's Colours, Brought Back

The colours Hokusai painted, brought back to the present

Unlike a painting, a ukiyo-e print passes from the artist's drawing through the hands of a carver and a printer before it is finished. From one set of blocks, the first edition is said to have run to about two hundred impressions. No two are quite the same colour, and over the years daylight fades them. So today the colours as they were first printed cannot be seen.

To preserve, for the generations to come, the colours Hokusai truly meant to print: that is the mission of the International Hokusai Society of the Japan Art Academy. The Society has now supervised the colours of the three best-known designs of the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji — Under the Wave off Kanagawa, Fine Wind, Clear Morning and Rainstorm beneath the Summit.

The Society established the correct colours, the prints were pulled again with techniques that have continued since the Edo period, and the mounting silks and papers — of the kind used only by the old houses that restore and remount antique scrolls — were chosen to suit each work. Each comes with a certificate of appraisal issued by the Japan Art Academy.

Under the Wave off Kanagawa — the best-known wave in the world

It is sometimes called the most famous picture after Leonardo's Mona Lisa. Debussy put this wave on the cover of the first edition of La Mer. The fingers of spray on the breaking crest; the small Fuji set in the trough below. The gradations of indigo, possible only in a print, are the life of the design.

Fine Wind, Clear Morning — Fuji set squarely before us

Many pictures show Fuji, but none places it this squarely and boldly. It is said to show the mountain a moment before the morning sun turns it red. The red of the slope, the indigo of the sky, the white streaks of snow, the stippled forest at the foot — with only these, the whole size of the mountain is given.

Rainstorm beneath the Summit — rain under a clear sky

Hakuu is rain that falls while the sky is clear. The summit stands in fine weather while lightning runs across the lower slopes: brightness above, black below, in one sheet. From where, exactly, did Hokusai see this Fuji?

Hokusai

Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) was a painter and print designer of the late Edo period. In 1998 he was the only Japanese named in LIFE magazine's list of the hundred most important people of the past millennium. He is said to have left some thirty thousand works. Painter, designer and teacher, Hokusai published the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, generally called his masterpiece, in his seventies, as large-format colour prints.

The series was first issued as thirty-six designs; it sold so well that ten more were added, making a set of forty-six.

The craft of the Edo woodblock — Takahashi Kobo

For more than four hundred years, since the early Edo period, the craft of the Edo woodblock print has passed from hand to hand, and it continues to this day, chiefly in Tokyo. Takahashi Kobo, which printed these, has worked for more than a hundred and seventy years since its founding at the end of the Edo period. The charm of the Edo print lies above all in the brilliance of colour that only multi-block printing can give: as many as twenty or thirty printings, each registered exactly, build up the distinctive tones.

The paper is the finest Echizen kizuki hosho. The soft, full body of the sheet and the way the pigment has soaked into it give a gentle warmth. Turn the sheet over and the picture shows through to the back, where you can look for the marks of the printer's baren — one of the pleasures of a hand-pulled print.