Source: The Conversation – UK
When I first saw Katsushika Hokusai’s Clear Day with a Southern Breeze (also known as Red Fuji, 1830 – 1833), I was struck by its lustrous red resonating against the receding blue of the sky. Clouds align gently in an almost humorous formation. Near the peak of the mountain, creases of snow. At its foot we are drawn to a multitude of tiny trees amassed in chorus. Easy to overlook, they change the picture. The great mountain becomes itself in relation to everything that surrounds it.
Dulwich Picture Gallery is showing all of Hokusai’s 36 Views of Mount Fuji, including ten added after the series became popular. Hokusai made them in his 70s in the early 1830s as cheap prints for ordinary people in Edo (today’s Tokyo). It is the first, and perhaps only, time the complete series will be shown together in the UK.
One image is instantly recognisable: The Great Wave (actually titled Under the Wave off Kanagawa). Seen alongside the others, it becomes one view among many – and a lesson in how quickly we settle on a single view of anything, including each other.
Three versions of Mount Fuji hang together in the first room. In Red Fuji the mountain is almost pure form. A light blue variant, its ridge edged in heavy indigo, opens a way into the mountain. A third, with lightning like cracks in a pot, feels dark and unsettled.
On the opposite wall hangs The Great Wave. Its foam reaches out like grasping, knuckled fingers, and flecks scatter across the dark water like stars in the night. Everything should be in motion, yet the print holds a stillness. Beneath the wave is Fuji again: a tiny triangle here where Red Fuji’s was expansive. It is the same mountain, but now framed by the sea.
Elsewhere, people hurry over bridges, work in fields and travel along roads. Hills seem to wear patterned bandanas of farmland, while Prussian blue skies fade at a soft, feathered edge. Shapes mingle playfully: three haystacks echo the three small peaks of Fuji’s summit. Hokusai places us in between, looking down on people and up at the sky, but never from a position that reveals everything.
In the third room, one print stopped me. In Mishima Pass in Kai Province, travellers link arms around an enormous tree. I saw an affectionate embrace, then learned they may be measuring its girth. How quickly I had decided what these strangers felt.
As an art psychotherapist, I work with exactly this. We imagine what others might be thinking and feeling, drawing on our own experience – therapists call this mentalising, and doing it well means staying with curiosity rather than assuming we know. I have never been to Japan and cannot experience Fuji as Hokusai’s first viewers did. What reaches me is what colour, form and shape do, across that distance.
Hokusai’s giant tree also recalls an experiment on awe in which people who had gazed up at towering eucalyptus trees for a minute picked up more of a researcher’s “accidentally” dropped pens than those who had looked at a building. A print may not make us kinder, but when we do feel part of a bigger picture, we may just become a bit less absorbed in ourselves, and perhaps more open to others.
The curation is less subtle than the prints. Its dusky blue walls echo Hokusai’s colours, but I was left cold. I felt fixed as a viewer, each picture held apart when I wanted to see how they connect – although the soft lighting creates an atmosphere, a quietness that simply lets you be with them.
At the end of the series, pilgrims climb into Fuji itself. Each looks much like the next, like frames of a stop-motion film. Near the summit they crowd into a shelter in the rock, a small window into something none could enter alone. We no longer look towards a distant mountain; we are drawn into it, among people making their own way upwards.
I left thinking about The Great Wave very differently. I could see the little mountain beneath it, but also the trees, travellers and pilgrims. The Fuji I began with had amassed a sense of journey, unfolding across the series.
Hokusai: Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji from the Iuchi Collection
is on at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London until January 17, 2027
Dominik Havsteen-Franklin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/22/hokusais-great-wave-is-one-of-46-prints-of-mount-fuji-and-seeing-them-together-changes-everything/