Katsushika Hokusai – South Wind, Clear Sky (Red Fuji), 1830–33 | Giclée Print

The mountain, the sky, a band of cloud, and nothing else. Hokusai gives the whole left half of the sheet to air and puts Fuji off to the right, so that what you look at first is not the mountain but the space it stands in. The red is the colour the cone takes at dawn on a clear summer morning when a south wind has blown the haze off — a thing that happens for perhaps a few days a year, which is why the sheet is called Gaifū kaisei, «south wind, clear sky», and why everyone else calls it the Red Fuji.

The companion to the Wave. Both come from the same series, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, both were cut and printed for the same publisher, Nishimuraya Yohachi, in the early 1830s, and both are ōban sheets of the same size. We print them on the same two papers, so they hang as a pair.

Why this impression and not another. No other Hokusai varies as much from copy to copy. The red block was printed with a fugitive pigment, and in most surviving sheets it has gone brown or ochre; the green at the tree line, which is a yellow laid over blue, loses its yellow first and turns flat blue. We compared eight impressions in four collections — three at the Art Institute of Chicago, three at the Metropolitan Museum, one at the Rijksmuseum and one at the Minneapolis Institute of Art — for resolution and for what the colour has done since 1830.

This is the Minneapolis sheet, and it wins on both counts. Measured the same way, its red is the most saturated of the eight (0.55 against 0.49 at the Met and 0.46 at Chicago), and it is the only one of the large files in which the green at the foot of the mountain still reads green rather than blue — it covers 12 % of the picture here, against 5 % at the Met and half a percent in the biggest Chicago sheet. The full numbers are on the record sheet.

What this is. A giclée reproduction, printed with pigment inks from the museum's own open-access photograph of this impression. Not the design redrawn, but this sheet — the woodgrain in the blue, the paper fibre, the block edges, the small unevennesses of a hand-pulled print. It is not a woodblock print. It is a print on paper, and it is sold as one.

Scale
Original: colour woodblock print (nishiki-e), ōban yoko-e, 25.7 × 37.7 cm. Minneapolis Institute of Art
50 × 40 cm / 19.7 × 15.7 in — original size, 1:1. Image 37.70 × 25.90 cm, 624 dpi available.
70 × 50 cm / 27.6 × 19.7 in — enlarged, 1.56× original. Image 58.80 × 40.39 cm, 400 dpi available.

Margins. Small sheet: 6.15 cm at the sides, 6.56 above, 7.54 below. Large sheet: 5.60 at the sides, 4.47 above, 5.14 below. Optical centre, 1:1.15, not the middle of the paper.

What we print is the block, not the paper. The Minneapolis sheet was trimmed long ago to the printed edge, so there is almost no margin left on the original. We crop to the outermost ink on all four sides and print that; the white you see around the picture is our paper, not Hokusai's. Nothing is straightened, and the colour of the museum's file is kept as it is — no correction, no reddening of a red that has already lived two centuries.

Provenance
Katsushika Hokusai (Japanese, 1760–1849), South Wind, Clear Sky (Gaifū kaisei), also known as Red Fuji, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei), c. 1830–33.
Colour woodblock print (nishiki-e), ink and colour on paper, ōban, 25.7 × 37.7 cm. Publisher Nishimuraya Yohachi.
Minneapolis Institute of Art, Gift of Louis W. Hill, Jr., acc. no. P.70.148.
Public domain. The museum publishes its photograph without restriction.

The print
Giclée on 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, twelve pigment inks. White border, optical centre. Unframed. Shipped rolled in a tube.

Further reading
The Great Wave — the companion sheet from the same series.