# South Wind, Clear Sky (Gaifu kaisei), also known as Red Fuji, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji > Katsushika Hokusai - c. 1830-32 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/katsushika-hokusai/hokusai-fine-wind-clear-morning-red-fuji/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-25 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Katsushika Hokusai - **Date:** c. 1830-32 - **Medium:** Woodblock print (nishiki-e); ink and color on paper, oban format - **Dimensions:** 24.4 x 35.6 cm (9 5/8 x 14 in.), this impression as trimmed and mounted; the nominal oban sheet runs closer to 25.5 x 38 cm and individual impressions vary with trimming - **Object type:** Print - **Period:** Japanese, Edo period, 19th century - **Current location:** Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary 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. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **c. 1830-32** Nishimuraya Yohachi (Eijudo), publisher, Edo `[documented]` (publication) Published in Edo as part of the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, under Hokusai's signature name Iitsu. The publisher's seal appears on the sheet. - **c. 1830s-1914** Unknown `[unknown]` (gap) No owner is documented for this specific sheet between its Edo publication and its appearance in the Metropolitan Museum's 1914 accession record. Whether it left Japan soon after printing, passed through a dealer's stock, or was bought directly from a Japanese source is not stated in the sources consulted. - **1914-present** Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York `[documented]` (acquisition) Acquired 1914 through the Rogers Fund, an endowment created from the 1901 bequest of Jacob S. Rogers, a New York locomotive manufacturer, and used by the Met for open-market purchases. Accessioned as JP9 in the Department of Asian Art. The individual dealer or seller from whom the Met bought the sheet is not named in the sources consulted; the Met's public catalogue record gives only the fund and the year. ## Open questions - Who sold the print to the Metropolitan Museum in 1914. The museum's public catalogue record credits the Rogers Fund and the year but names no dealer or private seller, and no fuller acquisition file was located in the sources consulted. - Where the JP9 sheet was between its c. 1830-32 publication and its 1914 accession at the Met. No owner is documented for that interval in the sources consulted. - Which printed state the Met's JP9 impression itself represents - Pink Fuji, standard Red Fuji, or an intermediate stage. The published technical sequencing work compared the British Museum and Smith College impressions, not this one. - The precise geographic vantage point of the view. Hokusai supplied no place name for this print, unlike most of the rest of the series, and the location remains unidentified in the sources consulted. - How reliable the widely repeated figure of about ninety-three surviving impressions is. It derives from a 2023 auction house catalogue note rather than a published museum census. - Whether this specific sheet passed through Western hands as an incidental wrapping for exported goods, as happened to some ukiyo-e generally, or reached a Western owner by ordinary print-dealer trade. Not documented for this impression specifically. ## Sources - [1] Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection record for South Wind, Clear Sky (Gaifu kaisei), also known as Red Fuji, accession JP9 (object 36490); data drawn from the Met's public collection pages and API. - [2] Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection record for South Wind, Clear Sky (Gaifu kaisei), also known as Red Fuji, accession JP2960 (object 55736), Henry L. Phillips Collection, 1939. - [3] British Museum collection record for Red Fuji, accession 1906,1220,0.525, mirrored with the museum's own descriptive text via Google Arts and Culture. - [4] Cleveland Museum of Art, collection record for South Wind, Clear Sky from Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, accession 1930.189, Bequest of Edward L. Whittemore. - [5] Victoria and Albert Museum, collection record for Fine Wind, Clear Weather (Gaifu), accession E.4813-1916, given by the Misses Alexander. - [6] Wikipedia, 'Fine Wind, Clear Morning'. Tertiary source; consolidates museum and scholarly citations. Flagged for replacement with the Keyes 2007 and Korenberg et al. 2019 papers directly and with primary museum catalogue entries. - [7] Wikipedia, 'Bokashi (printing)', for the hakkake bokashi technique and its documented use on the peak of this print. Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with a specialist printmaking technical study. - [8] Korenberg, Capucine F.; Pereira-Pardo, Lucia; McElhinney, Peter J.; Dyer, Joanne. 'Developing a systematic approach to determine the sequence of impressions of Japanese woodblock prints: The case of Hokusai's Red Fuji.' Heritage Science 7, article 9 (2019). Findings accessed via the BioMed Central companion summary of the study; the full paper itself sits behind a Nature/SpringerOpen login wall not accessible in this research pass. - [9] Keyes, Roger S. 'Pink Fuji: The Print Hokusai Saw.' Impressions, no. 29 (2007-08), pp. 68-75. Cited as listed in the Wikipedia bibliography for this print; the article itself is JSTOR-gated and was not independently retrieved for this research pass - flagged for direct verification. - [10] Artelino, 'Hokusai's Red Fuji - South Wind, Clear Sky', dealer/specialist commentary on the print's design and reputation. - [11] Wikipedia, 'Hokusai', for biographical facts (names, dates, training, the colophon quotation, deathbed words, his daughter Oi). Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with a scholarly biography such as Timothy Clark's or Christine Guth's studies of the artist. - [12] Wikipedia, 'Japonisme', for the general packing-material discovery narrative and the Bracquemond/Van Gogh reception chronology for ukiyo-e in the West. Tertiary source; documented for the trade generally, not for this specific print. - [13] Wikipedia, 'Thunderstorm Beneath the Summit', for the pairing and compositional comparison with this print. Tertiary source. - [14] Sotheby's, 'Fine Wind, Clear Weather (Gaifu kaisei), also known as Red Fuji', Masters of the Woodblock: Important Japanese Prints, March 2022, lot 19. - [15] Sotheby's, 'Fine Wind, Clear Weather (Gaifu kaisei), also known as Red Fuji', Masters of the Woodblock: Fine Japanese Prints, July 2023, lot 6, including the cataloguer's note on approximately ninety-three surviving impressions. - [16] ABC News (Australia), 'Prussian blue: From the Great Wave to Starry Night, how a pigment changed the world', for the pigment's Berlin origin, its trade route into Japan, and Hokusai's adoption of it. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.