Tokai Gábor szerk.: Fujiyama, A japán szépség Hokusai, Hiroshige fametszetein és fényképeken (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2005/4)

Hokusai and Hiroshige: Two Masters of Landscape ukiyo-e

absorbed techniques from such schools of traditional Japanese art as the Kano School, the Tosa School, and the Rimpa School, as well as from traditional Chinese art. Moreover, he demonstrated a great interest in Western techniques of art representation. In his last years, Hokusai was known as a 'mad old artist', who claimed that he would try to paint every single item and every single scene in this world. And so he did. Until his death at age 90 in 1849, he produced, during some seventy years, paintings and prints of landscapes, flowers and birds, as well as picture books. Landscape prints, in reality, only occupy a small percentage of his vast body of work. Nevertheless, he is considered by the general public as a landscape artist, and that is simply because of his masterpiece series entitled Fugaku sanju-rokkei, or Thirty-six Views ofMt. Fuji. Hokusai devoted himself to the composition of natural scenery in this series, and succeeded in capturing Mt. Fuji in various moods at various moments. This series gained immense popularity, but the whole world marvelled at three pieces in particular: Views on a Fine Breezy Day and Thunderstorm below the Mountain which place the viewer in an unmediated position face-to-face with nature, and Under the Wave off Kanagawa which exhausts geometrical calculations in the composition. Although this series is called Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji, 10 pieces were added later, thus forming a body of altogether 46 prints. Shortly after the completion of this series, Fugaku hyakkei, or One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji, was published. This three-volume picture book includes 102 prints of Mt. Fuji, which attest to Hokusai's commitment to the portrayal of the eternal mountain. In the afterword to the collection, Hokusai claimed that he had only grasped the essence of art after he had reached the age of 100, a comment through which we can catch a glimpse of his persistence towards art. Utagawa Hiroshige was born into a samurai family in 1797, 37 years Hokusai's junior. At age 13 he succeeded to his family's estate after his parents died, and two years later, at age 15, he became Utagawa Toyohiro's pupil. Toyohiro, the master, was a pupil of Toyoharu who had contributed to the development of uki-e. Toyohiro had few landscape paintings to his name, but his mild and delicate style was passed on to Hiroshige. The latter began his career as an artist under the name of Utagawa Hiroshige in 1812, and fulfilled both roles as an artist and as the family heir until 1823, when he gave up the latter. During his apprenticeship he practiced portraying actors and beautiful women. His first landscape series, Famous Places in the Eastern Capital, in which his skills as a landscape artist were displayed, was published in 1831, the same year in which the publication of Hokusai's Thirty-six Views ofMt. Fuji began. Two years later, in 1833, the publication of Hiroshige's masterpiece series Tokaido gojusan-tsugi, or The Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido Road, was launched. The Tokaido Road had already been described in the abovementioned Travels on Foot along the Tokaido Road as well as in various guidebooks; however, Hiroshige did not merely depict the landscapes, but also portrayed travellers or residents one would encounter along the Road, and created landscape prints that gave the viewers the impression that they themselves were travelling and visiting new places. Through this series Hiroshige established his name as artist, and his popularity persisted as he continued to produce further landscapes. The beauty of Mt. Fuji had always enchanted people of different eras in Japan. Mt. Fuji was praised first in the waka (a traditional Japanese poetic form; roughly speaking, a longer version of haiku) poems found in Manyoshu, or Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves; it did not appear in fine art until the Hei'an Period, when it was seen illustrated in scrolls and screens. Since then, it had been a recurrent subject in the works of various artists. Until the Edo Period, landscape paintings did not emphasise what the artist really saw, but required the artist to produce stereotypical images that would tell the viewer at first sight where the place was. Mt. Fuji, too, was illustrated in the same shape no matter what the artist's perspective was. In the Edo Period, the concept of shinkei-zu, or 'true-view pictures', was developed, and it was then that pictures of Mt. Fuji in diverse colours and shapes began to emerge. Mt. Fuji seen from the middle of Edo was considered part of the city, and became a symbol of Edo's prosperity, which was in competition with the economical and cultural centrality of Kyoto and Osaka. When artists painted Nihon-bashi Bridge, the prosperous centre of Edo, they made