Mount Fuji’s Many Faces Outshine the Great Wave in a Record-Breaking New York Moment
Hokusai’s iconic Great Wave may steal the spotlight, but it was the artist’s full "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji" that recently made auction history in New York, fetching over $3.5 million. This rare, complete set—patiently gathered over 11 years—outpaced even the record set by a single Great Wave print just last year.
The sale highlights a persistent fascination with Hokusai’s layered vision of Mount Fuji, where each print reveals a different mood, season, or vantage point. While collectors often chase individual masterpieces, assembling the entire series is a feat of dedication and cultural reverence. The auction also saw other Japanese and Korean works soar past expectations, with Hiroshige’s frogs and yellow roses leaping sixteenfold above their estimate, and Morita Shiryu’s bold calligraphy igniting bidding wars.
In the world of art auctions, sometimes the mountain outshines the wave—reminding us that a full panorama can be more powerful than any single crest.
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