Katsushika Hokusai
Creator of the Great Wave.
Katsushika Hokusai worked for seventy years and made over 30,000 pictures. Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, with The Great Wave, made him world-famous.
Katsushika Hokusai was born in 1760 in Edo, present-day Tokyo, in the Katsushika district, whose name he later took. As a young man he was apprenticed to a woodblock carver and learned the craft behind the prints from the inside. Around 1779 he entered the studio of the painter Katsukawa Shunshō, where he made actor portraits under the name Shunrō. Over his long life he changed his name some thirty times and, according to tradition, moved house nearly a hundred times.
He worked in almost every field: book illustrations, surimono, paintings, sketches and instruction manuals. From 1814 he published the Hokusai Manga, a series of sketchbooks of people, animals, plants and imaginary creatures that became a reference work for artists. The great breakthrough came only when he was around seventy. The series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji was published around 1830–32 and includes The Great Wave off Kanagawa and Fine Wind, Clear Morning, often called Red Fuji. Impressions of The Great Wave are held by the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the British Museum in London and the Tokyo National Museum, among others. Later came the picture books One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji.
Hokusai combined Japanese tradition with impressions from Western images that arrived via Dutch traders. He used perspective and the horizon in new ways and was among the first to make landscape the main subject of woodblock prints. The imported pigment Prussian blue gave his views their deep, lasting blue tones. His compositions are often bold, with a wave, a bridge or a tree in the foreground and Fuji small in the background.
Despite his fame he often lived in poverty. His daughter Katsushika Ōi worked by his side and was a skilled painter in her own right, and scholars believe she may have contributed to some of his late works. In the afterword to One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, Hokusai wrote that only in old age had he begun to understand the forms of nature, and that he hoped to become better still if he lived to a hundred. He died in 1849, aged 88, working to the very end.
After Japan opened to the West, Hokusai became one of the great models of Japonisme. Monet, Degas, Van Gogh and many others collected his prints, and The Great Wave was reproduced on the cover of Debussy's orchestral work La mer. Today the wave is one of the best-known images in the world and has been copied on everything from posters to emojis.