Kajikazawa in Kai Province

Perched on a jagged rock above the churning sea, a lone fisherman leans into his work, casting his lines while a young helper crouches low behind him. This is "Kajikazawa in Kai Province," part of Katsushika Hokusai's celebrated series "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji," made around 1830 during Japan's Edo period. Hokusai worked in the woodblock printing tradition called ukiyo-e, meaning "pictures of the floating world," and this series turned him into a household name across Japan.

The clever part is how the fisherman's lines fan out into the water and quietly mirror the sloping sides of Mount Fuji far off on the horizon. Man and mountain end up sharing the same graceful triangle shape, tying together the small human moment and the vast landscape. Nearly the whole scene glows in shades of blue, thanks to Prussian blue, a pigment freshly arrived in Japan at the time that let Hokusai paint water and sky in ways he never could before. The result is peaceful and tense at once, a working fisherman risking the waves while the sacred peak looks on without a sound.