Publisher's Synopsis
Mount Fuji is renowned worldwide as Japan's highest and most perfectly-shaped mountain. Serving as a potent metaphor in classical love poetry and revered since mediaeval times by mountain-climbing sects of both the Shinto and Buddhist faiths, Fuji has taken on many roles in ancient Japan. This volume explores a wide range of manifestations of the mountain in more recent visual culture, as portrayed in 100 works by Japanese painters and print designers from the 17th century to the present in the collections of The British Museumn. Featured alongside traditional paintings of the Kano, Sumiyoshi and Shijo schools are the more individualistic print designs of Katsushika Hokusai, Utagawa Hiroshige, Munakata Shiko, Hagiwara Hideo and others. New currents of empiricism and subjectivity have enabled artists of recent centuries to project a surprisingly wide range of personal interpretations onto what was once regarded as such an eternal, unchanging symbol.
