Noël Nouët

Noël Nouët (1885–1969) was a French artist and educator who spent the majority of his adult life in Tokyo, where he produced a distinguished body of woodblock prints depicting Japanese landscapes and cityscapes. Best known for his ambitious "Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji" series, Nouët combined a European painter's training with deep immersion in Japanese culture to create prints that offer a distinctive Franco-Japanese perspective on the Japanese landscape.

Born in Paris on September 24, 1885, Nouët studied art in France before traveling to Japan in 1912 to take up a position teaching French language and literature at universities in Tokyo. What was initially intended as a temporary academic appointment became a lifelong residence. Nouët remained in Japan for over four decades, becoming fluent in Japanese, marrying a Japanese woman, and immersing himself thoroughly in the country's culture and artistic traditions.

Nouët's interest in woodblock printmaking developed gradually during his years in Tokyo. He was deeply influenced by the landscape prints of the ukiyo-e tradition, particularly Hokusai's famous "Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji" series, which inspired him to undertake his own extended study of Japan's most sacred mountain. Over a period of years, Nouët sketched Fuji from numerous vantage points around the Kanto plain and beyond, eventually producing his own "Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji" series. Published by Takemura Hideo in the 1930s, these prints depict Fuji in all seasons and weather conditions — wreathed in clouds, reflected in lakes, glimpsed through pine trees, rising above rice paddies, and silhouetted against sunset skies.

Nouët's Fuji prints demonstrate his ability to merge European landscape painting conventions with Japanese woodblock aesthetics. His compositions are carefully structured, with strong foreground elements framing distant views of the mountain, and his color palette reflects both his French painterly training and his absorption of Japanese atmospheric sensibility. The prints were carved and printed by skilled Japanese craftsmen under Takemura's direction, achieving a technical quality that does justice to Nouët's refined designs.

Beyond the Fuji series, Nouët produced prints of Tokyo's streets, temples, bridges, and parks, as well as views of other Japanese locations. His Tokyo prints are of particular historical interest, as they document the city's appearance in the prewar and early postwar periods, capturing scenes that were subsequently transformed by wartime bombing and postwar reconstruction.

Nouët also published writings on Japanese art and culture, contributing to Franco-Japanese cultural understanding. His position as a French intellectual living in Japan gave him a unique perspective on both cultures, and his art reflects this bicultural vision. He was respected in both Japanese and French artistic circles, and his work was exhibited in both countries.

Nouët died in 1969 in Tokyo, the city that had been his home for over half a century. His prints, particularly the Fuji series, are held in collections including the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and various Japanese institutions. His work represents a distinctive chapter in the history of Western engagement with Japanese printmaking, that of an artist who did not merely visit Japan but lived there for decades, absorbing its culture so deeply that his art became a genuine synthesis of French and Japanese artistic traditions.