Putting Mt Fuji on the map

Who was the first Westerner to portray Japan's top mountain?

Some visitors to Japan are more productive than others. In a stay of just two years, the naturalist and physician Engelbert Kaempfer (1651-1716) catalogued the country’s flora, discovered that the ginkgo tree was far from extinct, as then believed in Europe, made two visits to Edo, and presented himself to the Shogun.

"Fusino Jamma: een zeer hooge en Zonderlinge Berg"
Detail from a map in Engelbert Kaempfer's History of Japan (High Dutch edition)

On his way to and from the capital, Kaempfer passed close by the foot of Japan’s top mountain. In his History of Japan, published posthumously in English in 1727, he lauds "The famous Mount Fuji in the province of Suruga, which in height can be compared only to Mount Tenerife in the Canaries". Fuji, he continues, "is conical in shape and so even and beautiful that one may easily call it the most beautiful mountain in the world .... The poets and painters of this country never end praising and portraying the beauty of this mountain".

Map of Suruga Bay, showing Mt Fuji (top right)

The German doctor never got the chance to make the first gaijin ascent of the iconic volcano, leaving that honour to Rutherford Alcock a century later. Instead, according to Professor H Byron Earhart (see References), he may have made its first graphic depiction by a Westerner. A sketch appears within an engraving of the Tōkaidō route through Suruga Province that illustrates his book. Interestingly, the summit region is shown as divided into three peaklets.

Mt Fuji: the traditional view

Japanese artists had long depicted the mountain with three peaks – as shown in a famous ink painting of Mt Fuji and the Seiken temple once attributed to Sesshū (1420-1506). Yet this configuration had less to do with ground truth than with an artistic convention, probably rooted in Buddhist numerology, that sacred mountains should have triple crowns. It seems fitting, somehow, that Kaempfer's pioneering image of Mt Fuji should pay homage to this centuries-old tradition.

References

H. Byron Earhart, Mount Fuji: Icon of Japan, University of South Carolina Press, 2011.

Map images: courtesy of the East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley

Meizan inspirations

How Japan's most famous mountain erupted into an Impressionist painting

As it was the Sensei’s birthday, we dropped in at Japanese Inspirations, a new exhibition at the Zurich Kunsthaus. If you happen to be an aspirant meizanologist, you meet Meizan everywhere. So it was no surprise to find Mt Fuji featuring in several landscapes by Hokusai and Hiroshige. The idea behind the exhibition is to highlight how these artists of the floating world influenced the Impressionists, by placing their prints side by side with paintings by Monet, Gauguin, van Gogh and others.

Some of the prints had once been in the personal collection of Vincent van Gogh. An enthusiastic fan of Hokusai and Hiroshige, the artist owned about 400 Japanese prints in all, papering the wall of his studio with them. As if in homage to the master, he even made oil painting renditions of two scenes by Hiroshige (above). The attraction of Japanese woodprints is explained in a letter to his brother:

I envy the Japanese artists for the incredible neat clarity which all their works have. It is never boring and you never get the impression that they work in a hurry. It is as simple as breathing; they draw a figure with a couple of strokes with such unfailing easiness as if it were as easy as buttoning one's waist coat.

Seeing these prints made me wonder what part Japan's top mountain played in van Gogh’s artistic development. He knew Hokusai’s famous views of Mt Fuji, urging his long-suffering brother in a letter of August 1888 to “take (ie buy) the Hokusais as well then, 300 views of the sacred mountain and scenes of manners and customs”. And he greatly admired The Great Wave, one of Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mt Fuji, commenting on it in another letter to his brother the same year:-

When Paul Mantz saw Delacroix’s violent and exalted sketch, Christ’s boat, at the exhibition that we saw in the Champs-Elysées, he turned away from it and cried out in his article, ‘I did not know that one could be so terrifying with blue and green’. Hokusai makes you cry out the same thing — but in his case with his lines, his drawing, since in your letter you say to yourself: these waves are claws, the boat is caught in them, you can feel it.

As any art historian will tell you, those waves with claws have crashed with resistless force into van Gogh’s Starry Night, painted less than a year after he wrote the letter quoted above. Mt Fuji itself, alas, seems to have been washed away in the process, unless you discern it, subtly transmogrified into that church steeple or those mountains in the picture’s background.

Unfortunately, the Starry Night wasn’t in this exhibition: quite understandably, the New York Museum of Modern Art wouldn't be keen to let the painting out of its sight.

So, navigating through shoals of banquiers and their lamé-clad dames – this is Zurich, remember – we had a quick look round to see if Japan’s most famous mountain had left its mark on any other works by the Dutch master.

Standing in front of the Portrait of Père Tanguy (left), I thought that perhaps we’d struck lucky. The background to this painting shows a selection of Japanese prints, pinned to the wall of van Gogh’s studio, and there, right behind the subject’s hat, was a tell-tale shape  – conical in form, yet maddeningly indistinct.

One couldn’t be certain; the white blur might be the snowy profile of Japan’s most famous mountain. Or, then again, it might just be a cone of sherbert.

It turns out, though, that van Gogh painted three versions of this portrait - Père Tanguy was a figure of some importance to impecunious artists, kindly providing them with paint in return for a drawing or two. The picture shown in Zurich was the second version. But the final one (right), which today hangs in the Musée Rodin, Paris, shows Mt Fuji with dramatic clarity.

It’s as if, after years of absorbing the lessons of his Japanese mentors, van Gogh had finally gained total confidence in the power of line and colour. And, with it, the painterly panache to give the top Meizan its full due.