Age of Revolution
Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849)
Japanese Ukiyo-e painter.
Katsushika Hokusai worked in Edo (modern Tokyo) across nearly seven decades, changing his art-name some thirty times as his style evolved. Trained in the ukiyo-e print tradition — where a designer's drawing was carved and printed by separate craftsmen for a broad city public — he ranged across actor prints, book illustration, erotica, brush painting, and the fifteen-volume 'Hokusai Manga', a sprawling encyclopedia of sketched life.
In his seventies he produced the work that made him immortal: the series 'Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji' (c. 1830-1832), including 'The Great Wave off Kanagawa' and 'Fine Wind, Clear Morning'. Using the newly imported Prussian blue and the woodblock's flat, decisive color, he set the sacred mountain within scenes of everyday labor, travel, and weather. His designs marry bold graphic pattern to acute observation of motion and force.
Exported to Europe after Japan's opening, Hokusai's prints helped ignite Japonisme: their flat color, cropped framing, and everyday subjects were studied by Monet, van Gogh, Cassatt, and their circle, feeding directly into Impressionism and beyond. Hokusai himself claimed he was only beginning to understand drawing in extreme old age, and hoped to become a true artist by a hundred and ten. He died in 1849.
The words the record keeps using: dynamic, observant, bold, playful, tireless, graphic, reverent.
At a glance
- Lived 1760–1849
- Origin Japanese
- Worked in Edo (Tokyo)
- Era Age of Revolution
- Movements Ukiyo-e
- Mediums Ink on paper, Polychrome woodblock print
- Techniques Keyblock and color-block printing, Bokashi gradation
Works in the archive
- The Great Wave off Kanagawa, 1831 (From Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (impressions in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and elsewhere))
The most famous image in Japanese art: a towering wave with clawing foam-fingers about to crash over three slender boats of straining oarsmen, with Mount Fuji small and serene beneath its curl. Force and stillness, the… - Fine Wind, Clear Morning (Red Fuji), 1831 (From Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, no. 33)
Mount Fuji alone, its slopes flushed red-brown by the light of a clear late-summer dawn, snow lingering at the summit and a band of white cloud along the base. One of the simplest and grandest of the series — the… - Kajikazawa in Kai Province, 1831 (From Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji)
A lone fisherman braces on a rocky spur, his lines running down into misty water, with a boy crouched beside him and Mount Fuji echoing his triangular pose across the haze. A quiet study of solitary labor mirrored in… - Ejiri in Suruga Province (Travellers Caught in a Sudden Breeze), 1832 (From Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji)
A gust of wind scatters travellers along a road: hats fly off, a woman's papers whirl into the sky in a diagonal spray, and everyone bends and clutches while Mount Fuji stands unmoved beyond. Hokusai turns an invisible…
What was said
From about the age of six he had a mania for drawing the shapes of things; by seventy nothing he had made was worth counting; only at seventy-three did he begin to grasp the structure of birds, animals, insects, and plants, so that by a hundred he might reach a marvellous level and by a hundred and ten every dot and line would be alive.
Writing to his brother Theo from Arles, van Gogh held up the Japanese printmakers as a model, praising the clarity, simplicity, and swiftness of their drawing and the way their art was made for a wide public.
Cassatt wrote to Berthe Morisot insisting she must not miss the exhibition of Japanese prints at the École des Beaux-Arts, treating it as essential study for any modern painter.
Lineage
Passed on to Mary Cassatt, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh
What would Hokusai make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Katsushika Hokusai", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Hokusai · Keep a life moment the way Hokusai would · Pictures made after Hokusai