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

a point of painting the Edo Castle and Mt. Fuji as well. Mt. Fuji could be viewed from every corner of Edo, as if it towered over the city for its protection. Edo residents' feelings toward Mt. Fuji were certainly above mere appreciation. Furthermore, in the years of the Tempo Era (1830-1843) when Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji came into existence, Mt. Fuji became an extremely popular object of worship, and received numerous pilgrims. Residents of Edo otherwise built Fuji-zukas, or miniature surrogate Mt. Fujis, near where they lived, and worshipped these on a daily basis. Mt. Fuji, or its substitutes, therefore, was a familiar symbol in people's daily lives. It was only natural then that Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji should be widely accepted and admired. Hiroshige's Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido Road also included seven Mt. Fuji prints, one of them with an explicit title: Fiara, Mt. Fuji in the Morning. He also incorporated Fuji-zukas in one of his last works, Meisho Edo hyakkei, or One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. His posthumous publication Fuji sanju-rokkei, or Thirty-six Views ofMt. Fuji, focussed on the Mountain exclusively. Hiroshige was constantly conscious of Hokusai, his predecessor. In the afterword to his posthumous work Fujimi hyakuzu, or One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji, he claimed that Hokusai pursued only original compositional effects and thereby reduced Mt. Fuji to a mere accessory, whereas he himself presented Mt. Fuji the way it really looked. As this publication was posthumous, it is impossible to rediscover Hiroshige's true thoughts, but at least we could catch a glimpse of how Hokusai and Hiroshige's contemporaries regarded the relation between the two artists. If we compare their representations of Mt. Fuji, we can see that Hokusai's Mt. Fuji is not only a mountain in the landscape, but a spiritual pinnacle resembling Penglai, the Utopian mountain in Chinese mythology. In contrast, Hiroshige did not attempt to portray a divine Mt. Fuji, but rather a natural mountain that faced and stood through wind, rain, and snow, a mountain that was part of Edo commoners' daily lives. Therefore, Mt. Fuji in Hiroshige's works does not stand out on its own, but stands in harmony with everything around it. Hokusai's and Hiroshige's Mt. Fuji prints also influenced non-japanese artists. It is said that Paul Cezanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire series indicates traces of influence from Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji. Vincent van Gogh's Portrait of Père Tanguy (1887) has in its background several ukiyo-e, including Hiroshige's Sagami River from his series Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji, which symbolises van Gogh's Japanophilia. Hokusai and Hiroshige, contemporaries, produced masterpieces of ukiyo-e, contributed to the new genre of landscape prints, and influenced later artists home and abroad. It was thanks to these two artists that ukiyo-e received high acclaim and Japanese culture gained widespread appreciation. Sato Mitsunobu, Director of Hiraki Ukiyo-e Museum 1 Traditionally, Japanese artists sealed their works with their artist names. In this article, real names and arlist names are placed in ihe 'surname - given name' order, following the lapanese norm. As a custom, a Japanese artist would inheril his or her master's surname, as well as one character from the master's given name.