"The Thirty-six Views of Fuji" stands as one of his two greatest works. Here, in the forty-six plates that constitute the main series and the supplement, the same motive is treated recurrently, but with infinite variety. He depicts Fuji, the sacred mountain, in storm and calm, in mist and sunlight—sometimes dominating the colossally empty frame of the design, sometimes receding to a mere speck in the distance; and around the noble peak beat the waves of the sea and the foam of the clouds and the restless stream of human life, in a great epic of infinite diversity and profound unity.
HOKUSAI: FUJI, SEEN FROM THE PASS OF MISHIMA, PROVINCE OF KAHI.
One of the Series "Thirty-six Views of Fuji." Size 10½ × 15. Signed Saki no Hokusai I-itsu, hitsu.
Plate 50.
In this series his trivial realism is forgotten, or employed only in just subordination. Throwing aside his earlier vulgar absorption in the minutiæ of existence, he concentrated his vision on one conception, one chosen impression, so sharply and personally seen that he evoked a new style in landscape. Much it borrowed from tradition; but the flavour was Hokusai's. These designs are, primarily, magnificent studies in linear composition. The great sweep of Fuji's slope is related to the rhythm of every other line in the picture. And the line-dominance is preserved by the use of the simplest and most original of colour-schemes—green, blue, and brown—broadly laid on in large masses. A highly decorative quality and great boldness are the result.
The justly famous "Wave" belongs to this series. Here for the first time in our survey of the prints do we find elemental fury depicted with grandiose eloquence. In the majestic composition of the "Great Tree" ([Plate 50]) the calm sublimity of nature and the infinitely minute, vermin-like aspect of man is superbly expressed. In the "Tama River" ([Plate 49]) Hokusai gives us a sweep of wave and shore, mist and mountain, that his great predecessors, the landscape-painters of Sung days in China, might have envied. In all these prints he relates man and nature to each other with a vividness and dramatic power foreign to his great rival Hiroshige.
The world which Hokusai pictures in this series is not the real world, but Hokusai's highly personal translation of it into terms of superb imagination. A thousand memory-stored impressions combine to make the sharp composite of each design; and it is to use the term in its technical Platonic sense, the Idea of the scene that he flashes before us. Herein lies the abnormal vitality that emanates from these pictures. "We feel," says Mr. Binyon, "that the world holds more wonders than we dreamed of, sources of power and exhilaration which Hokusai has revealed, and which we may go and discover for ourselves."
Hokusai's other great work was a series of ten upright prints of very large size, "The Imagery of the Poets." It returns in feeling, though not in technique, to the style of the classic masters; and remains, because of its high seriousness of mood and its sweeping magnificence of composition, at the very top of all Hokusai's work. Of all his thousands of designs, the one that is supreme is probably the print of this set which depicts the famous Chinese poet Li Peh beside the chasm and cascade of Luh.
Even his latest years were crowded with continued efforts. In 1849, at the age of eighty-nine years, he died.