Katsushika Hokusai

Katsushika Hokusai was born on 31 October 1760 in the Honjo district of — the city now called Tokyo — the son of an artisan who supplied bronze mirrors to the shogunate. He was apprenticed to a woodblock engraver at thirteen and by eighteen had entered the studio of the ukiyo-e master Katsukawa Shunsho, mastering the depiction of kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers before his ambitions outgrew the genre. The restlessness that defined his life showed early: he was expelled from the Katsukawa school after Shunsho's death in 1793, possibly for studying the Kano and Tosa styles that his teacher considered rival traditions, and he spent years without a school affiliation, studying European copperplate engraving, Chinese ink painting, and Western perspective through the Dutch books that arrived via the Dejima trading post in Nagasaki. He changed his artistic name approximately thirty times across his career — among them Shunro, Sori, Kako, Taito, and finally Iitsu and then Gakyojin, the old man mad with painting — each name marking a new phase, a new ambition, a new technique. His most enduring name, Hokusai, meaning North Star Studio, he adopted around 1798. The Hokusai Manga — fifteen volumes of sketches published from 1814 onward — was not a comic book in the modern sense but an encyclopedic catalog of the observable world: figures, animals, landscapes, supernatural beings, plants, fish, waves, and crowds rendered in rapid ink drawings that became training manuals for a generation of Japanese artists and a revelation to European artists when they arrived in Paris in the 1860s. Van Gogh copied Hokusai's waves. Monet collected his prints. Debussy kept an image of The Great Wave on his desk while composing La Mer. The masterwork arrived in 1831 with the publication of Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, a series of forty-six woodblock prints — Hokusai added ten to the original thirty-six — that transformed the sacred mountain into a visual field of endlessly varied possibility. Under the Wave off Kanagawa, known universally as The Great Wave, places Fuji as a pale triangle beneath a towering wall of blue-green water whose claw-tipped foam reaches toward three fishing boats. The composition compresses distance and danger into a single freeze-frame that Western viewers read as pure dynamism and Japanese viewers knew as the stillness before catastrophe. Fine Wind, Clear Morning — Red Fuji — shows the mountain at dawn, its slopes shifting from red to blue-gray, serene and immovable. The series defined what Japanese landscape painting could be. His daughter Katsushika Oei, also known as Oi, was herself a gifted painter who worked in her father's studio, and historians now attribute several works long assigned to Hokusai to her hand. Hokusai moved house over ninety times in his life, partly from creditors and partly from a belief that moving cleared creative stagnation. He began each decade with fresh ambition rather than resting on achievement. At seventy-three, in his preface to One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, he wrote: 'From the age of six I had a passion for copying the form of things. From about fifty I produced works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three I partly understood the structure of animals, birds, insects and fishes, and the life of grasses and plants. And so, at eighty-six I shall have made further progress, and at ninety I shall have penetrated even further into their deeper meaning, at one hundred I shall have become truly marvelous, and at one hundred and ten, each dot, each line will surely possess a life of its own.' He did not reach a hundred and ten. He died on 10 May 1849 in , aged eighty-eight or eighty-nine, reportedly saying: 'If only Heaven will give me just another ten years — just five more years, then I could become a real painter.'

Unlock Katsushika Hokusai's full archive.

Contemporaries

Themes