Katsushika Hokusai

Hotei, c. 1830–1849.

Sumizuri-e (monochrome woodblock print), 20.7 × 12.9 cm.

Library of Congress, Washington, D. C.

Hokusai’s talent travelled across land and sea to Europe long ago. But his work, so original, so diverse, and so prolific, still remains misunderstood. It is true that, even in the artist’s homeland, though he has always been immensely popular, his work has not been received with the same fervour by the academy and by the elite as by the Japanese people. Was he not reproached, in his own time, for only doing ‘vulgar paintings’? Then, however, few artists knew how to delve into the potential of drawing techniques and methods as he did. What artist can vaunt his ability to draw with his fingernails, his feet, or even his left hand (if right-handed) or inverted, with such virtuosity that it seems to have been drawn in the most conventional way?

Hokusai illustrated more than 120 works, one of which, the Suiko-Gaden, consisted of ninety volumes. He collaborated on about thirty volumes: yellow books and popular books at first, eastern and western promenades, glimpses of famous places, practical manuals for decorators and artisans, a life of Sakyamuni, a conquest of Korea, tales, legends, novels, biographies of heroes and heroines and the thirty-six women poets and one hundred male poets, with songbooks and multiple albums of birds, plants, patrons of new fashion, books on education, morals, anecdotes, and fantastic and natural sketches.

Hokusai tried everything, and succeeded. He was tireless, multitalented, and brilliant. He accumulated drawings upon drawings, stamps upon stamps, informing himself very specifically about his compatriots, their work, and their interests, and about the people in the streets, those in the fields, and those on the sea. He opened the gates to the walls that hid brilliant courtesans, their silks and embroidery, and the large belt knots spread across their chests and stomachs. He frightened observers with apparitions from his most awful and stirring, fantastic imagination.

To understand the art of a very particular, distant people, it is not sufficient to learn, more or less well, their language; it is necessary to penetrate their soul, their tastes – one must be the obedient student of this soul and these tastes. It is, after all, founded on love, the profound ecstasy that artists feel in expressing their country. They love it passionately, they cherish its beauty, its clarity, and they try to reproduce its life from the heart. A happy affliction, Hokusai was an eminent representative of those who work incessantly.

Kintoki the Herculean Child with a Bear and an Eagle, c. 1790–1795.

Ōban, nishiki-e (polychrome woodblock print), 37.2 × 24.8 cm.

Ostasiatische Kunstsammlung, Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin.

Hokusai was born in 1760, sometime in October or November. He was born in Edo in the Honjo neighbourhood, close to the Sumida River and to the countryside, a neighbourhood to which the painter was much attached. He even signed his drawings, for a time, “the peasant from Katsushika”, Katsushika being the provincial district where the Honjo neighbourhood is located.

According to the will left by his granddaughter, Shiraï Tati, he was the third son of Kawamura Itiroyemon, who, under the name Bunsei, would have been an artist of the new profession. Near the age of four, Hokusai, whose first name was Tokitarō, was adopted by Nakajima Ise, mirror designer for the Tokugawa royal family.

Hokusai, whilst still a child, became the assistant to a great bookseller in Edo where, whilst contemplating illustrated books, he carried out his duties as assistant so lazily and disdainfully that he was fired. Paging through the bookseller’s illustrated books and life in images for long months developed the young man’s taste and passion for drawing.

In 1774, he began an apprenticeship with a woodcutter and in 1775, under the name Tetsuzō, he engraved the last six pages of a novel by Santchô. Thus, he became a woodcutter, which he continued until the age of eighteen.

In 1778, Hokusai, then named Tetsuzō, abandoned his profession as a woodcutter. He was no longer willing to be the interpreter, the translator of another’s talent. He was taken by the desire to invent, to compose, and to give a personal form to his creations. He had the ambition to become a painter.

He entered, at the age of eighteen, the studio of Katsukawa Shunshō, where his budding talent earned him the name of Katsukawa Shunrō. There, he painted actors and theatre sets in the style of Tsutzumi Torin and produced many loose-leaf drawings, called kyoka surimono. The master allowed him to sign, under this name, his compositions representing a series of actors, in the upright format of the drawings of actors by Shunshō, his master.

At this time, the young Shunrō began to show a bit of the great sketch artist who would become the great Hokusai. With perseverance and relentless work, he continued to draw and to produce, until 1786, compositions bearing the signature of Katsukawa Shunrō, or simply, Shunrō. In 1789, the young painter, at twenty-nine years old, was forced to leave Katsukawa’s studio under peculiar circumstances. As a matter of fact, Hokusai would keep the odd habit of perpetually moving and of never living more than one or two months in the same place.