Ukiyo-e artist
Katsushika Hokusai
葛飾北斎 · 1760–1849 · Edo period
Katsushika Hokusai (葛飾北斎) is the most famous Japanese artist in the world, mostly thanks to one woodblock print of a wave. He never stopped working. Over seventy years he made tens of thousands of pictures. But he created the work that changed how the world sees Japan only in old age.
The wave and the mountain
Around 1830, when he was about seventy, Hokusai published Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. He did not paint the sacred mountain as one grand subject. He showed it small and far away, glimpsed past bridges, fields and rooftops. One print became the most copied image in all of Japanese art. This is The Great Wave off Kanagawa, with tiny boats under a huge curling wave and a small Fuji in the distance. Years later his prints reached Europe. Their flat colours and bold framing helped shape Impressionism and a wider craze for Japanese things.
The old man mad about painting
Hokusai changed his artist name more than thirty times. According to stories, he moved house more than ninety times. He called himself Gakyō Rōjin, "the old man mad about painting." He was sure his work kept improving with age. He once wrote that with five more years of life, he might at last become a true painter. He died at eighty-eight, still drawing.
Portrait: CC0 · via Wikimedia Commons
