Hokusai, Ono no Komachi

During his peak period of woodblock print publication in the 1830s, Hokusai produced two series of single-sheet prints dedicated to poets, True Mirrors of Poetry, a vertical series which included both Japanese and Chinese poets, and One Hundred Poems Explained by the Nurse, a horizontal series in which each sheet illustrated one of the poems in the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu. Together with the slightly earlier series, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, the One Hundred Poems series is considered to be the pinnacle of Hokusai’s work as a woodblock print designer. The One Hundred Poems series, which would have been Hokusai’s most ambitious series of single-sheet prints, was interrupted by the Tenpö famine of the mid-1830s, and never completed. Only twenty-eight prints (twenty-seven in full color and one in only keyblock impression) are known to have survived.