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Cooper inside a giant barrel working the wood; through its ring appear a field and a tiny Fuji far away

Fujimigahara in Owari Province

Katsushika Hokusai, c. 1830–1832

What you see

A huge barrel stands on edge, forming a circle across the center and right. Inside, a man with a bare torso and a cloth around his head bends over the wood with a tool. Through the ring appear a field crossed by lines, a band of trees and, on the horizon, a tiny white mountain. On the left, a tall, thin tree leans over some bushes.

The colors are few and clean: green, blue in the sky, pale yellow on the ground and the beige of the wood. The staves are marked with regular lines. Watch for the coiled hoops lying on the ground at left and the mallet and wooden box beside the cooper.

About Katsushika Hokusai

Katsushika Hokusai was born in Edo, today’s Tokyo, in 1760 and died there in 1849, after a long career as a painter, book illustrator and designer of woodblock prints. When he was about seventy he created “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji”, whose bright imported Prussian blue helped make landscape prints popular in Japan. Its most famous image, “The Great Wave”, became an icon of world art, and his daughter Katsushika Ōi, who worked by his side, was a remarkable painter too.

All 12 works by Katsushika Hokusai

More by Katsushika Hokusai

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