Amelie Balcou

This collection of woodblock prints celebrates the seasons and is designed as a Japanese-style accordion-fold book with open binding and slipcased with a booklet for the text. Embracing seasonal change is an important part of Japan’s native belief system and an enduring theme of its creative expression. Japanese artists—including Hokusai, Hiroshige, Harunobu, and many others—have long celebrated the endless cycle and rhythm of nature and the fleeting transience and beauty of the seasons, depicting common customs from picnics welcoming spring under blossoming cherry trees to ritual offerings made to the autumnal harvest moon. The seasonal iconography includes recurring plant and wildlife elements: plum blossoms, irises, morning glories, cranes, geese flying in migratory formation. Some pictorial compositions focus upon a single time of year, but many encompass all four seasons together. This beautiful and elegant collection makes the ideal gift for anyone interested in the art and culture of Japan. The classic woodblocks in this collection express essential truths about the natural world and the evanescence of human experience in a visual idiom that, while distinctively Japanese, has great universal appeal.

Hokusai's series depicting Mount Fuji is widely considered to be the pinnacle of his career. This beautiful boxed accordion- fold edition comprises the full set of forty-six prints (the original thirty-six and ten more that were completed later) and features a luxurious silken binding along with a separate explanatory booklet. The book and booklet are packaged in an elegant slipcase. Devoted entirely to landscapes, Hokusai's series shows Mount Fuji from various viewpoints, framed in different ways. An indefatigable traveler who was passionate about nature, Hokusai explored every vantage point and season at the volcano. He presented it both as a solitary and majestic snow-capped peak and as a smaller object on a distant horizon. Hokusai also portrayed the mountain as an element in Japanese daily life and as an imposing force of nature that can be peaceful and beneficent, or ferocious and unforgiving. These impeccably reproduced prints invite readers to examine Hokusai's virtuosic use of color and composition, his talent for contrasting perspectives, and his interest in the dueling roles of man and nature. An exquisite objet d'art, this volume is the perfect vehicle for appreciating Hokusai's crowning achievement in all its lasting and subtle beauty.