These places were often already known through poetry and classical literature, associated with natural and seasonal features like waterfalls, cherry blossoms, or the reddening of maple trees.

They had also become attractive due to events, performances, or the presence of structures such as bridges, temples, shrines, inns, restaurants, and shops that had sprung up in cities and along the new roads.

In addition to individual prints, illustrated books (*ehon*) helped popularise Edo (Azuma) and the Tōkaidō Road as well as other famous locations.

During the Edo period, a popular cult developed, encouraging pilgrimages to the mountain and even the construction of small Fujis within cities for those unable to visit in person.

Hokusai was undoubtedly a devotee of this place, which became the subject of his most significant works: the polychrome series “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” created between 1830-32, consisting of 46 prints, including the famous “Great Wave” and “Red Fuji”;
and the three beautiful volumes of “One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji” printed in black ink in 1834, which open with the figure of the goddess of the mountain, Konohanasakuya-hime no Mikoto, and contain Hokusai’s artistic testament, signed "Manji, the old man mad about painting".

The former features ten portraits of Chinese and Japanese poets who shaped classical poetry, with landscapes evoking their verses and native places, executed in a vertical composition that exudes poetic grandeur.

Sangi Hitoshi (also Minamoto no Hitoshi) (Sangi Hitoshi)
From the series: One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets, Explained by the Nurse (Hyakunin isshu uba ga etoki)
Katsushika Hokusai,
1835-1836
Polychrome woodblock print
From the Museo d'Arte Orientale Edoardo Chiossone, Genova

©Museo d'Arte Orientale Edoardo Chiossone, Genova

The latter series, drawing from Fujiwara Teika’s 1235 anthology “One Hundred Poems for One Hundred Poets”, portrays vivid scenes in shades of green, brown, red, blue, and yellow, but remains incomplete with only twenty-seven finished prints and around sixty-four preparatory drawings (shitae).

One can read the evolution of the sign, the continuous change in the treatment of his subjects.

In the paintings of beaux-arts there is, from the 1910s and for the first decades of the 19th century, a transition from flowing, soft lines to more broken lines, from slimmer, longer figures to more imposing one's.

The singular portrait of a woman giving birth made during the Taito period with a realist approach dates from 1817.

Trio of Players of Shamisen, Koto and Kokyū Katsushika Oi
1818-1830
Vertical scroll (kakejiku)
Ink and paint (nikuhitsu) on paper
From Museo d'Arte Orientale Edoardo Chiossone Genova

©Museo d'Arte Orientale Edoardo Chiossone Genova

As he grew older, he devoted himself to more spiritual and auspicious subjects that were meant to accompany and protect him: divine and legendary animals such as Chinese lions, tigers combined with the bamboo plant, carps and turtles thousands of years old, and dragons ascending to Fuji and the sky.

The dragon was the sign of the zodiac under which Hokusai was born and under which, at the age of sixty, he decided to leave his stage name Taito to his pupil who became Taito II.

Accompanying Hokusai until the end of his life was his daughter Ōi, also a talented painter, who collaborated constantly with her father, working four-handed and whose skill in the Western painting technique of chiaroscuro can be admired.