There are images so thoroughly ingrained into global visual culture that seeing the original — or as close to the original as a woodblock print allows — requires a conscious act of rediscovery.
Katsushika Hokusai’s Under the Wave off Kanagawa, known simply as The Great Wave, is one of them. Reproduced on everything from tea towels to tattoos, its formal power can feel muted by familiarity before you have even entered the room.
The new exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery is a reminder of what that familiarity costs us, and a sustained argument for looking again.
Hokusai and Mount Fuji, drawn from the Iuchi Collection in partnership with the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, presents the complete series of Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, the sequence Hokusai began around 1830 when he was already in his 70s and at the height of his creative powers.
The series charts Japan’s most sacred mountain from an extraordinary range of vantage points: through summer haze and winter snow, glimpsed between the struts of a barrel-maker’s workshop or dwarfed by a cresting wave, present always but never fixed, a mountain that refuses to behave like a monument.
What strikes immediately is how alive the series is to everyday life. Fuji is not isolated in these prints as an object of contemplation. It appears behind labourers, travellers and fishermen going about ordinary business, its presence a constant that most of the figures seem barely to register. The sacred and the mundane occupy the same frame without irony, which is a more radical compositional decision than it first appears.
Hokusai’s use of Prussian blue is the series’ technical signature. A synthetic pigment newly arrived in Japan from Europe, its vivid, stable hue gave Hokusai a colour that could carry the weight of sky and sea in ways that traditional Japanese pigments could not. The series proved so immediately popular that the publisher expanded it beyond the original thirty-six prints, adding ten more to meet demand. Several of those later additions are included here, and the tonal shifts across the full sequence trace the evolution of an artist experimenting in real time.
Among the highlights is a rare variant impression of Clear Day with a Southern Breeze, commonly known as Red Fuji, making its UK debut. Seen alongside the familiar deep blues and whites of The Great Wave, the contrast is startling: a mountain at dawn, glowing copper-red against a sky of pure blue, with no wave, no human figure, nothing to mediate between the viewer and the mountain’s silent mass. It is one of the most quietly powerful images in the show.
Dulwich is a fitting setting. Its domestic scale and natural light suit works that were never meant for grand institutions, prints made to be held, passed around and looked at closely. The exhibition offers exactly that chance.
Hokusai and Mount Fuji is at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, until 17 January 2027.
