Hokusai’s series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (published around 1830–1832) changed Japanese woodblock printmaking by expanding what a landscape print could do, and it later shaped European modern art after Japanese prints began arriving in large numbers in the mid-1800s. The series mattered because it linked a traditional subject, Mount Fuji, to new design, new color technology, and a new way of showing everyday life, and those choices became a model for both Japanese artists and European painters.
The first influence was technical and commercial: Hokusai used a new pigment that made his prints look unusually vivid and durable. Prussian blue, a synthetic pigment first made in Europe in the early 1700s, became widely available in Japan in the early 19th century through trade networks that connected Japan indirectly to Dutch merchants. In many Fuji prints, deep blue sits next to paler blue in flat, clean areas, which made water, sky, and distance look fresh and modern. This color helped make landscape prints popular with buyers who wanted something different from the earlier dominance of actor prints and courtesan portraits. It mattered because a new pigment did not just change color; it helped push the market toward landscapes and made publishers invest in large series.
A second influence was compositional: Hokusai treated Mount Fuji as a stable reference point while changing viewpoint, scale, and framing in bold ways. In The Great Wave off Kanagawa, the wave fills the foreground and Fuji appears small and far away, creating strong depth through overlap and scale rather than through Western-style shading. In other designs, Fuji is seen through a barrel, behind a bridge, or across busy work sites, so the mountain becomes part of daily experience rather than a distant symbol. This encouraged later ukiyo-e artists to experiment with unusual cropping, strong diagonals, and asymmetry. It mattered because it broke expectations about how a “proper” landscape should be organized and gave print designers more freedom.
A third influence was thematic: the series connected travel, labor, and place in a way that fit the changing society of the late Edo period. Under the Tokugawa shogunate, Edo (now Tokyo) grew rapidly, roads such as the Tōkaidō supported travel, and domestic pilgrimage to famous sites increased. Hokusai shows fishermen, farmers, porters, and craftsmen working with the mountain present in the distance, which turns Fuji into a shared landmark across classes. This approach made landscape prints feel relevant to ordinary buyers, not only to elites or religious institutions. It mattered because prints became a mass medium for seeing Japan, shaping a common visual identity.
The series also influenced Japanese printmaking by raising the status of the landscape series as a long, coherent project. A numbered set like Thirty-Six Views encouraged collectors to follow and compare designs, and the commercial success led to more views being added beyond the original count. Other artists, including Utagawa Hiroshige, developed their own travel and landscape series soon after, such as The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō (first published 1833–1834). Hiroshige’s mood and weather effects differ from Hokusai’s more graphic force, but the idea of a serial journey through place became central to late ukiyo-e. It mattered because the “series” format shaped how prints were produced, marketed, and understood.
European Impressionists and related modern artists later took concrete lessons from Hokusai’s methods, especially after Japan reopened to wider foreign trade in the 1850s and 1860s and Japanese objects and prints circulated in Paris and London. Many European artists collected ukiyo-e; Claude Monet owned Japanese prints, and Vincent van Gogh copied prints by Hiroshige to study their color and line. From Hokusai and other printmakers, they learned to accept flat color areas, strong outlines, and daring cropping as serious design, not as mistakes. They also learned that a picture can be built from pattern and rhythm as much as from modeled light. It mattered because these ideas supported the move away from academic painting’s traditional rules of perspective and finish.
Hokusai’s Fuji series influenced Impressionism in another way: it showed that modern life and landscape belong together. Impressionists painted train stations, rivers, bridges, and leisure scenes, often with a stable element that anchors shifting light and movement. Hokusai’s repeated mountain works similarly, giving unity while the foreground changes from print to print. This is not the same technique as oil painting, but the artistic problem is similar: how to make a series that studies viewpoint and atmosphere without repeating the same image. It mattered because it helped legitimize serial observation as a modern artistic method.
Today, Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji remains a key example of how an art form aimed at popular audiences can drive innovation and influence global movements. The series shows how materials like Prussian blue, design strategies like asymmetrical framing, and publishing formats like collectible sets can reshape what artists consider possible. It also explains why “Japonisme” in 19th-century Europe was not just fashion; it was a transfer of visual ideas that helped form modern art’s vocabulary of composition and color.