River landscape: ferry-boat and Mount Fuji

Katsushika Hokusai 葛飾北斎 (1760-1849) · 1842

Hokusai was eighty-three years old when he painted this landscape of Mount Fuji, which was an prominent subject of his prints and paintings in his later years. The composition follows a formula derived from Chinese landscape painting in which distant elements are placed higher in the composition. Here, Mount Fuji is at the highest, most distant point, but the focal scene of human activity—a boat loaded with passengers and cargo sweeping across the water—is in the foreground. This work displays many characteristics of Hokusai’s original style of landscape painting: a distinctive color palette of yellows, blues, and greens; expert control of composition, line, and thin application of ink and color; and the use of dots of various tonalities to depict landforms and trees.