tour 18 of 19
Views of Mount Fuji
Munakata Shikō, 'Kanaya' (Kanaya), a woodblock print
From the series
'Munakata's Prints of the Tōkaidō Highway'
(Tōkaidō Munakata
Hanga)
In
March 1963, at the age of sixty, Munakata was comissioned by the
Suruga Bank to make a series of Tōkaidō prints. In the course of
the next year he went on numerous field trips for this project,
producing sixty-two designs, some in black and white, some with
hand-colouring.
For
'Kanaya', a view of the post-station roughly half
way along the Tōkaidō, colour has been painted by hand from both
the front and the back of the sheet. The hand-colouring for each
impression is radically different; each impression has a subtitle
in the margin which presumably reflects the differences in
colouring. Here it reads 'Evening peak of the
heart' (kyōkin
bogaku). In his diary-commentary about the
series the artist describes coming over a pass from the west and
suddenly seeing the vast view of the ōi River below with Fuji
rising up beyond: 'My heart opened up - it was as splendid
as can be' (Nantomo subarashii ni
tsukiru kyōkin gyōkai
deshita).