Visitors on a wooden balcony gaze toward distant, snowcapped Mount Fuji across a wide plain

Sazai Hall at the Temple of the Five Hundred Arhats

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What you see

A wooden balcony fills the foreground, crossed from side to side by a railing. Leaning on it, several visitors look into the distance: on the left a man stretches out his arm, two women with ornaments in their hair look on and another man covers his head with a cloth. Beyond lies a broad grey-brown expanse, with a small Fuji at the center, and on the right rises the wall of the temple.

The blues of the sky, deepest at the top, play against the yellow wood and the patterned kimonos. The floorboards lead the eye toward the railing. Watch for the two travelers resting on the floor at right and the small green bell hanging from the eaves.

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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