Japanese Ibises in Front of Mount Fuji

Although Fritz spent much of his childhood in Java, where his father worked as an engineer for the railways, he never returned to Asia later in life. He therefore never saw Japan or Mount Fuji, as he himself mentions in the French text on the painting. The Nipponibis was virtually extinct in the 1960s. It is quite possible that Fritz saw this beautiful scene in an older photograph, or perhaps he simply imagined it. In any case, he must have liked the image so much that he captured it on canvas. Today, there are again about 500 Japanese ibises, but the species is still threatened with extinction.