Katsushika Hokusai: Red Fuji, c. 1831 – Porcelain Art Mug

The mountain fills the sheet from edge to edge and almost nothing else happens. A red cone against a blue sky, a band of cloud lying flat across the middle, a dark forest at the foot. No people, no boats, no road. The snow is bare paper: the white gullies running down the cone are the places where no block touched the sheet.

The Japanese title is Gaifū kaisei — south wind, clear sky. It names a condition, not a place. On a few mornings in late summer and early autumn, with the wind from the south and the air clear, Fuji turns red in the first light. The print is the record of a weather event that lasts a matter of minutes.

It belongs to Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, the series that also produced the Great Wave. The two are usually named in the same breath — the loudest sheet in the set and the quietest — and both were printed with the same imported Prussian blue, which had reached Japan in quantity only a year or two before.

The impression printed here came to the Metropolitan Museum in 1914. The sheet is clean and the paper light, and the sky runs unbroken from deep blue at the top to pale at the horizon. That gradation is not a separate block: the printer wiped the colour across the block by hand, once for every single sheet, which is why no two impressions of this print are quite the same.

The mug carries the sheet whole, cropped just inside the paper margin, at the proportions of the original — 24.4 by 35.6 centimetres.

The fourth product image shows four details from the sheet: the title cartouche with the signature, the summit with the snow left in the gullies, the banded cloud, and the line where the forest meets the red of the cone.

Fine Porcelain — 10 oz. Dishwasher and microwave safe.

Katsushika Hokusai, South Wind, Clear Sky (Gaifū kaisei), also known as Red Fuji, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, ca. 1830–32. Woodblock print, ink and colour on paper, 24.4 × 35.6 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1914 (JP9). Open Access, public domain.

Selected by Dr. Walther Fuchs for the Tazzarte collection.