All Forty-Six Views: Hokusai's Mount Fuji Arrives Complete at Dulwich

Almost everyone knows The Great Wave. It turns up on tote bags, phone cases, mugs and emoji keyboards, which is not bad going for a woodblock print made in Edo-period Japan around 1831. Fewer people know that it was never meant to be seen alone. It is one sheet in a series of landscapes in which Hokusai, then past seventy, set out to show Japan’s sacred mountain from every angle he could think of.

From tomorrow, 20 October, Dulwich Picture Gallery in south London presents Hokusai: Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji from the Iuchi Collection. The gallery says it is the first time the complete series has been shown together in the UK. It runs until 17 January 2027, and if you have only ever met Hokusai through a fridge magnet, this is the show to go and see.

Why thirty-six means forty-six

The title is a small puzzle to start with. The series was published between 1830 and 1833, and it sold so well that the publisher asked for more. Hokusai added ten further designs, so “Thirty-six Views” contains forty-six prints. Dulwich is showing all of them, with the extra ten in place, which lets you see the series as the people of Edo bought it rather than as a few famous highlights.

Part of what sold the series was a colour. Prussian blue, a synthetic pigment first made in Berlin in the early eighteenth century, had only recently become affordable in Japan through trade. It was deeper and more stable than the plant-based blues printers had relied on, and Hokusai used it everywhere: in sky, water, distant hills and the clawing crest of the wave.

A mountain in the background

What makes the series more than a set of postcards is how little room Fuji often takes up. Sometimes it fills the sheet, as in Clear Day with a Southern Breeze, the print most people call Red Fuji, where the mountain glows against a sky of mackerel clouds. More often it is pushed into the distance. It is glimpsed through the hoop of a giant barrel a cooper is building, framed by the timbers of a bridge, or set behind travellers bent against the wind. In The Great Wave it is a small snow-capped peak, about to be dwarfed by the sea.

That is the real subject of the series: ordinary working life, with the eternal mountain always in view. Fishermen, porters, farmers and kite-flyers get on with their day while Fuji stays still. Seeing it all together makes that clearer than any single image can.

What to look out for

Two highlights stand out. The first is what the gallery calls a beautifully preserved impression of The Great Wave. Condition matters enormously with these prints. They were cheap commercial objects printed in large numbers, and most surviving impressions have faded, especially the light-sensitive blues. A strong, fresh impression shows the cut of the block and the gradation of colour as Hokusai’s printers meant them to be seen.

The second is a rare variant of Red Fuji that the gallery says has never been shown in the UK, displayed alongside images of the better-known red version. Comparing impressions of the “same” print is one of the quiet pleasures of looking at Japanese woodblocks. Different printings used different colours and wiping, so two sheets pulled from the same blocks can feel like two different times of day.

The prints come from the Iuchi Collection, which is on deposit at the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo. Fittingly, that museum is devoted to European art, while Dulwich, founded in 1811 and best known for its Old Masters, is welcoming a Japanese master. The exchange runs both ways.

Hokusai and the British eye

There is a strong UK thread here too. When Japanese prints flooded into Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, they changed how Western artists composed pictures. Off-centre framing, high horizons, flat areas of colour and foreground objects cut off by the edge of the sheet all found their way into Impressionism and beyond. In London, Whistler’s Thames nocturnes owe an obvious debt to Japanese printmaking.

For would-be collectors, the show is also a lesson in looking. Good impressions of the most famous designs now sell for very large sums at auction, and learning to judge colour, registration and condition with excellent examples in front of you is the best training you can get. Many independent galleries and print dealers across the UK handle Japanese woodblocks at far more modest prices, from Hiroshige and Kuniyoshi to twentieth-century shin-hanga artists.

Planning your visit

Adult tickets start at £21.50 including a donation, and Friends of the gallery go free. Dulwich is open Tuesday to Sunday, 10am to 5pm. The gallery has built a full programme around the show, including a curator’s talk on 3 November, an online introduction with curator Jane Findlay on 1 December, hands-on Japanese woodblock printmaking workshops from late November, and a British Sign Language tour on 17 December. Bear in mind that wet coats, large bags and umbrellas are not allowed in the exhibition rooms, because the prints are fragile.

Take your time. Forty-six views of one mountain sounds like it might get repetitive. In Hokusai’s hands, it never does.