136 views of Mount Fuji
May. 14th, 2007 06:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mrphThe weekend was quite fun and involved a trip to see my family. It also involved a trip to Southampton Art Gallery, which was hosting the Japan: A Floating world in print exhibition at the time.
Disclaimer: I'm no good whatsoever at describing art. For the most part, the remainder of this post doesn't even attempt to try.
...and that was rather good. I was expecting to see a few prints from Hokusai's 36 Views of Mount Fuji and I wasn't disappointed (I'd seen some of the series before, but not all of the ones on display...). I'm really quite fond of Hokusai.
As well as that, it had a few of Hiroshige's 53 Stations of the Tōkaidō prints, which I don't think I'd seen anywhere before. I'm not quite as impressed by his work as by Hokusai's prints - but the winter scenes were lovely, as were the ones set in the rain.
Having said all that, the work that really impressed me was by someone else altogether - Ogata Gekko's 100 views of Mount Fuji. Despite the name, the subject matter's quite different from Hokusai's set. The mountain is still there, but these prints (done several decades later than the others) depict the lives of peasants, not the nobility - and the colour and style is distinctly different from the other, earlier work.
Gekko doesn't seem to be quite so well-known - or at least not so well profiled online? There's a site showing some of his work here, but I haven't found much other information. And there's an unfortunate lack of art books on Amazon etc - bah!
Disclaimer: I'm no good whatsoever at describing art. For the most part, the remainder of this post doesn't even attempt to try.
...and that was rather good. I was expecting to see a few prints from Hokusai's 36 Views of Mount Fuji and I wasn't disappointed (I'd seen some of the series before, but not all of the ones on display...). I'm really quite fond of Hokusai.
As well as that, it had a few of Hiroshige's 53 Stations of the Tōkaidō prints, which I don't think I'd seen anywhere before. I'm not quite as impressed by his work as by Hokusai's prints - but the winter scenes were lovely, as were the ones set in the rain.
Having said all that, the work that really impressed me was by someone else altogether - Ogata Gekko's 100 views of Mount Fuji. Despite the name, the subject matter's quite different from Hokusai's set. The mountain is still there, but these prints (done several decades later than the others) depict the lives of peasants, not the nobility - and the colour and style is distinctly different from the other, earlier work.
Gekko doesn't seem to be quite so well-known - or at least not so well profiled online? There's a site showing some of his work here, but I haven't found much other information. And there's an unfortunate lack of art books on Amazon etc - bah!
