Curator Ann Yonemura on Hokusai

We have the honor of having Ann Yonemura with us today. Ann is the senior associate curator of Japanese art at the Freer|Sackler. She shares with us how special and rare it is to have the complete set of Hokusai prints on view, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, selected from seven museums and two private collections.

“It’s very difficult to bring the series together this way. It really is the first show of the full series that I have seen in my lifetime. It’s up for twelve weeks only, so it’s brief, just like the cherry blossoms. The prints are beautiful, and in excellent condition. Visitors to the exhibition will be seeing the prints as they would have appeared in the 1830s, when they were first published.”