Okazaki (Station 38, Print 39)

Catalog note / 解説

In the first two decades of the 1800s, Hokusai experimented with a wide variety of compositional techniques and formats as he struggled to develop the individual style that would characterize his later prints. This landscape, from a series depicting the stations of the Tökaidö (East Sea Road) route connecting the ancient capital of Kyoto with the political center of Edo, captures Hokusai’s stylistic turmoil at the time. While the composition is divided into foreground, mid-ground, and background, the transitions between each of these sections are problematic, a fact only partly masked by the use of clouds between them. Hokusai’s early landscapes, while not always entirely successful, formed…