Kirifuri Waterfall at Mount Kurokami, Shimotsuke Province, c.1832
Price range: $245.00 through $295.00
Hokusai’s most famous waterfall looks almost alive, its streams spreading over the rocks like the fingers of an enormous hand. At the bottom, three pilgrims gaze up; two more are scrambling up the cliff beside it for a better look.
Strange, energetic and impossible to ignore, it brings real movement to a wall. Up close it is pure pattern; from across the room it is a roaring mountain.
Kirifuri Waterfall at Mount Kurokami, Shimotsuke Province, c.1832
The print
Print Quality: Gallery-standard archival pigment giclée, made to order
Media: 308gsm 100% cotton Hahnemühle Photo Rag
Texture & Tone: Super-matte, smooth chalky finish with soft, muted blacks
Longevity: Museum-grade, generational permanence
Photo Rag suits this woodblock especially well. Its smooth cotton surface adds no texture of its own, so the fine carved lines, the soft gradations of blue and the grain of Hokusai’s original sheet, nearly two centuries old, come through exactly as they are.
Sizes available:
30×45cm, 12×18″, fine art print, open edition
40×60cm, 16×24″, fine art print, open edition
Safe, tracked delivery guaranteed worldwide, with sustainable packaging.
The story
This print comes from A Tour of Waterfalls in Various Provinces (Shokoku taki meguri), sometimes called A Tour of Japanese Waterfalls: eight upright prints Hokusai designed around 1832 for Nishimuraya Yohachi (Eijudō), the Edo publisher of his Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. He was in his seventies, and signed them “Iitsu, formerly Hokusai”.
Kirifuri means “falling mist”. The falls lie north of Nikkō, in today’s Tochigi Prefecture, and were long admired by pilgrims on their way to the shrines and temples there, among them the Tōshō-gū, mausoleum of the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu. The water drops in steps and breaks into dozens of writhing streams over the rocks. Hokusai shows it in extreme close-up, so the falls become a pattern as much as a place, and the people looking up at them seem very small indeed.
