South Wind, Clear Sky (Gaifu kaisei), also known as Red Fuji, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji

A color woodblock print of about 1830-32 showing Mount Fuji alone, its lower slopes catching the red light of an early autumn dawn, from Hokusai's series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. This record anchors on the impression at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, acquired through the Rogers Fund in 1914 (accession JP9), a separate sheet from the museum's own second impression of the same design (JP2960, given in 1939) and from every other impression discussed here.

The print is best known in the West as Red Fuji, but the mountain's color is not fixed: surviving impressions range from a rare, muted early state called Pink Fuji to the strong red of the standard run, and scholars have used wear in the woodblocks and the choice of pigments to argue over which came first. The mountain itself is built without the black keyblock outline that defines most other shapes in the print; its silhouette is a product of color and gradation printing alone.

This is a different sheet, from the same 46-print series, as the Great Wave off Kanagawa already recorded on this site under a separate Art Institute of Chicago impression. The two share a publisher and a production window and nothing else in their individual object histories.

A mountain built without an outline

Every other shape in this print carries a printed line: the title cartouche, the signature, the band of forest at the mountain's base, the small trees on its lower slopes. Mount Fuji itself does not. Its silhouette is produced entirely by the meeting of color blocks and by a graduated overprinting technique called hakkake bokashi, in which a flat color is laid down, the same block is washed and re-inked unevenly, and a second pass is printed over the first to create a soft tonal shift. On this print that second pass is what turns the peak from red slope to a dark, almost black summit, and the edge of the mountain against the sky is the edge of the color, not a carved line.

This is worth stating precisely because it is often asserted loosely. What is documented is the technique itself and where it appears - the darkened peak - not a blanket claim that no impression of this print ever carries an outline anywhere near the mountain. Some later or variant impressions do use a fine indigo line to mark the mountain's contour and its tiny trees. What stays constant across the print's history is that the mountain's basic mass and shape read through color and bokashi rather than through the black keyblock line that ordinarily does that job in ukiyo-e printing.

Not one color, three: Pink, Red, and an outlier

Surviving impressions of this design do not agree on what color Mount Fuji is. Print scholars group them into recognizable states. The rarest and, on current evidence, the earliest is known as Pink Fuji: a muted, close-toned impression in which the mountain runs from green at its base to a soft brown at the summit, printed with the costly pigment orpiment and with a more complex, harder-to-produce gradation than later printings show. The impression most people mean when they say Red Fuji is the strong, even state that gives the print its popular name, colored with benigara, an iron-oxide red. A further, rarer variant departs from both: in it the mountain's outline is left unprinted altogether and its interior is filled with a deep blue bokashi instead of red, a state sometimes called Blue Fuji.

The Metropolitan Museum's own collection holds two separate impressions of this same design under two different accession numbers, JP9 (the sheet this record anchors on, from the Rogers Fund in 1914) and JP2960 (given by the Henry L. Phillips Collection in 1939). They are not the same object photographed twice; they are two separate sheets pulled from the same set of blocks, of slightly different trimmed size, acquired forty-five years apart by different means. Reading which state JP9 itself belongs to would require the kind of side-by-side technical comparison scholars have so far published for other pairs of impressions, not this one specifically - see Open Questions.

Sequencing the states: Keyes and the British Museum's analysis

The print scholar Roger S. Keyes, author of a catalogue raisonne of Hokusai's surviving single-sheet prints, argued in a 2007 article for the journal Impressions that the muted Pink Fuji state was not a faded accident but the closest surviving witness to what Hokusai actually designed, before a publisher or printer pushed the coloring toward the bolder red that sold better. Keyes titled the piece Pink Fuji: The Print Hokusai Saw, a title that states his conclusion outright.

That argument was tested with physical evidence in 2019, when Capucine Korenberg, a conservation scientist at the British Museum, published a study with colleagues in the journal Heritage Science comparing a Pink Fuji impression held by the Smith College Museum of Art against a Red Fuji impression held by the British Museum. The team examined line quality and signs of wear across the shared woodblocks and analyzed the pigments non-destructively. They found the Red Fuji impression showed more block wear than the Pink Fuji one, and that the Pink Fuji impression used a more expensive and more difficult-to-execute palette - the kind of choice a printer trims away once a design is in full production, not one a workshop would add later. Their conclusion supported Keyes: Pink Fuji came first, and Red Fuji is a subsequent, simplified, commercially adjusted state of the same blocks.

What the series is, and where this print sits in it

Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji was published by Nishimuraya Yohachi (also known by his shop name Eijudo) beginning around 1830-31. It proved successful enough that ten further designs were added afterward, so the finished series runs to forty-six prints under a title that still says thirty-six. This print and The Great Wave off Kanagawa, recorded separately on this site, come from the same series and the same publisher and were designed within the same few years, but they are physically distinct objects with independent histories from the moment each sheet was pulled from the press.

Within the series, this design and one other - Thunderstorm Beneath the Summit, sometimes called Black Fuji - are usually singled out as the two views that show Fuji alone, without travelers, buildings or any human incident, from what appears to be a similar elevated distance. Thunderstorm Beneath the Summit is close in composition to this print but reverses its mood entirely: heavy dark tones, a storm-lit sky, and a mountain apparently seen from its western, unpopulated side, against this print's hazy, populated-implied, eastern-facing calm. Hokusai gave no place name for either view, unlike most of the rest of the series, so the exact vantage point in both cases is not identified in the print itself.

Materials: an imported blue and a mineral red

The sky's blue is Prussian blue, the first synthetic pigment in Western chemistry, discovered by accident in Berlin around 1705 by the color-maker Johann Jacob Diesbach. It reached East Asia by trade and, reportedly, some smuggling in the early nineteenth century, manufactured more cheaply once workshops in Guangzhou worked out the recipe; in Japan it circulated under the name bero, a corruption of Berlin. Hokusai was among the earliest ukiyo-e printmakers to use it extensively, and this series is one of the works most associated with that adoption, since the pigment let printers render distance and atmosphere in a way the traditional indigo could not match as cheaply.

The mountain's red in the standard state is benigara, an iron-oxide pigment sometimes called Bengal red or red ochre; the rarer, earlier Pink Fuji state instead used orpiment, an arsenic-sulfide mineral pigment that was more expensive and, on the conservation evidence above, associated with the more careful and costly early printing before the design was simplified for volume production.

Reception: esteemed differently at home and abroad

This print and The Great Wave off Kanagawa are frequently named together as the two most internationally recognized images to come out of Japanese printmaking, and both helped shape the vocabulary that European painters drew from during the vogue for Japanese art later in the nineteenth century. But their standing is not identical in the two places. Within Japan, Red Fuji is generally regarded with more esteem than the Great Wave, whose international fame - as a picture of imperiled fishermen under a cresting sea - outweighs its domestic reputation next to a print many Japanese viewers read as a more dignified, more purely national image of the sacred mountain itself.

How ukiyo-e prints as a class reached Western hands is documented for the trade generally, though not for this individual sheet: prints were cheap, mass-produced sheets in Japan, sometimes used to wrap or cushion exported ceramics, and it was in that incidental role that some of the earliest examples reached European buyers before their artistic value was recognized on its own terms. Whether this particular impression, or the Met's JP9 sheet specifically, arrived in the West by that route or through a conventional print dealer's stock is not established in the sources consulted for this record.

This impression: how it entered the Metropolitan Museum

The sheet this record anchors on is accessioned JP9 in the Met's Department of Asian Art, credited to the Rogers Fund and dated 1914. The fund itself is an endowment created from the 1901 bequest of Jacob S. Rogers, a New York locomotive manufacturer whose fortune the museum used for decades afterward to buy across departments on the open market; it is a purchase fund, not a gift from a named donor of the object itself. The Met's published catalogue record for JP9 states the fund and the year but does not name the dealer or private owner the museum bought the print from, and no fuller acquisition file has been located in the sources consulted for this record.

A second, later impression of the identical design sits in the same museum's collection under accession JP2960, credited to the Henry L. Phillips Collection and dated 1939, twenty-five years after JP9 entered the museum and by an entirely separate route - a bequest rather than a fund purchase. The two prints have different trimmed dimensions (JP9 at 24.4 x 35.6 cm against JP2960 at 25.4 x 37.8 cm), which on its own confirms they are two different physical sheets rather than one object catalogued twice.

The market: a print that is genuinely rare, not merely famous

No sale of the Met's JP9 impression is documented in the sources consulted; it has been museum property since 1914 and this record treats that as the plain state of things rather than a gap to paper over.

Other impressions of the same design do reach the market with some regularity and give a sense of the print's value and its true scarcity. Sotheby's sold an impression in its March 2022 Japanese print sale (lot 19) against an estimate of GBP 150,000 to 200,000, and a second impression in its July 2023 sale (lot 6) against a higher estimate of GBP 450,000 to 500,000; the hammer and premium figures for both are behind a login wall in the sources consulted and are not repeated here as fact. The July 2023 catalogue entry is useful for a different reason: it states that only about ninety-three impressions of this design are documented to survive worldwide, of which roughly twenty-two are thought to remain in private hands, making it markedly scarcer than the Great Wave, of which roughly one hundred thirty impressions are estimated to survive. That census figure comes from an auction house's own research rather than from a museum survey, and this record treats it as reported, not independently verified.

The artist's name on this sheet

Hokusai signed this print Hokusai aratame Iitsu hitsu, drawn by Hokusai, now changed to Iitsu - one instance of a habit that ran through his entire working life. He is documented as having used something on the order of thirty different names and pen-names over roughly seventy years of practice, each change typically marking a shift in his style, his patronage, or his sense of what stage of his career he had reached. A cataloguer or a buyer working from the signature alone, without knowing this practice, could reasonably mistake a later Hokusai sheet for the work of an entirely different hand; the name on this print is accurate and it is also not the name most readers know him by.

What the design shows, and what it withholds

The print gives no place name, which sets it apart from most of the rest of the series, where Hokusai typically anchors the view with a named town, road or province in the title. Three shades of blue deepen through the sky in a near mirror of three tonal bands on the mountain; a thin line of cloud and, in the earliest state, an uneven, hand-brushed sky give the impression of light and air moving rather than sitting still. Faint remnants of snow are visible near the summit and dark shading marks the tree line lower down, details specific enough that they have been read as placing the scene in early autumn, when Fuji's slopes can briefly redden with sunrise light while old snow still clings near the top and the forest below is still in full shadow. The composition is often described as the most abstracted in the series and, for exactly that reason, the most precisely dated by season of any image in it.

What is not claimed here

This record does not claim the Met's JP9 impression has been placed within the Pink Fuji to Red Fuji sequence by any published study; the technical comparisons cited above were carried out on the British Museum, Smith College and comparable impressions, not this one. It does not claim a documented export-as-packing-material story for this specific sheet, only for the ukiyo-e trade in general. And it does not claim knowledge of who sold the print to the Metropolitan Museum in 1914; the museum's own public record does not say, and no other source consulted fills the gap. Recording these as open rather than inferring an answer is the discipline this publication exists to hold to.