Yoshida Tea House Hokusai Poster 'Tokaido'

Hokusai print of the Yoshida tea house on the Tokaido, travellers and Fuji framed

A tea house that advertises the view, and the view itself. This is Hokusai's picture of a tea house at Yoshida on the Tokaido, the great road between Edo and Kyoto: travellers sit on the bench inside under a signboard that promises the mountain, a woman brings tea, porters rest outside with their loads, and Fuji sits white and small in the open front of the house, exactly where the sign says it will be. It is a picture about tourism, drawn two hundred years ago.

It is the print for a person who likes a joke, and for a kitchen.

The name, Tokaido, is the road the tea house stands on, the coast road of the fifty-three stations, and the picture is a stop on it.

The print is reproduced from the woodblock print on a textured canvas, stretched round a wooden frame with the image wrapping the edges, so it hangs without a frame and without glass. The colours are the print's own: the deep Prussian blue, the cream of the paper, the greens and the rose of the sky. The cartouche with the series title and the artist's signature is printed in the corner, as on the Edo sheet.

Hang it on a single nail at eye level, alone or in a row of three with two others from the series, which is how they look best. It goes above a desk, a sofa or a bed.

The signboard is the detail: painted with characters that name the house as the one with the view of Fuji, it hangs over the travellers, and the mountain sits beneath it in the gap of the doorway like a picture in a frame. The porters outside are drawn with their packs and their bare legs.

Every print in the collection is photographed on the same wall at the same scale, so the pages compare.

Dust with a soft dry cloth or a brush; do not wet it. Keep it out of direct sun, which fades the blue over years, and away from a radiator, which loosens the canvas.

From across a room it is an interior with figures and a mountain. From close the sign shows its characters, the travellers their tea, and the porters their loads. It is the print for a person who has stopped at a roadside and looked up.

Three sizes: 40 by 60 cm, 50 by 75 cm and 60 by 90 cm. The smallest suits a shelf or a small wall, the middle a desk, the largest a wall on its own. The image is the same in all three.