South Wind, Clear Sky, from Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (early 1830s): Art, History and Details

South Wind, Clear Sky, from Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (early 1830s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Katsushika Hokusai (Japanese, 1760–1849).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Mt. Fuji, Japan’s highest mountain, appeared in most Japanese 19th-century travel literature. Maps sometimes showed its location with a Fuji-shaped icon and indicated where travelers could get the best view of it. Between 1829 and 1833, Hokusai created a print series depicting thirty-six views of the mountain, including this one, sometimes known as “Red Fuji.” The season in this scene is a time between late summer and early autumn, when the mountain takes on a reddish hue.

Object facts

• Title: South Wind, Clear Sky, from Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji
• Date: early 1830s
• Creator attribution: Katsushika Hokusai (Japanese, 1760–1849)
• Culture: Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
• Type: Print
• Technique: color woodblock print
• Dimensions: 25.6 x 37.5 cm (10 1/16 x 14 3/4 in.)
• Collection: Japanese Art
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1930.189

A detail from the museum

During the printing process, the natural grain of the cherry wood printing block was imprinted onto the paper along with the red-colored dye.

Collection credit

Bequest of Edward L. Whittemore

Further reading listed by the museum

• Howard Conley Hollis. "The Edward Loder Whittemore Collection of Japanese Prints." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 17, no. 4 (April 1930): 64–66.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1978. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978.
• Talbot, William S. “Visions of Landscape: East and West.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 70, no. 3 (March 1983): 112–135.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.