Katsushika Hokusai

Katsushika Hokusai was a Japanese painter and woodblock printmaker of the late Edo period, best known for the series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji and its most famous image, The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Over a career of some seven decades he helped turn ukiyo-e, the popular print art of Japan's cities, from pictures of actors and courtesans towards landscapes, plants, animals and everyday life. In the late 19th century his work became one of the main sources of the European craze for Japanese art.

Hokusai was born in Edo, the capital of the Tokugawa shogunate and today's Tokyo, traditionally on 31 October 1760, though the exact date is uncertain. He grew up in the Katsushika area of the city, from which he later took his best-known name. His father is thought to have been a mirror-maker who worked for the shogun, and the boy began drawing at about six.

At around 12 he worked in a lending library, and at 14 he was apprenticed to a woodcarver. At 18 he entered the studio of Katsukawa Shunshō, a leading designer of prints of kabuki actors, and in 1779 he published his first prints under the name Shunrō.

Hokusai used at least thirty names in his life, often marking a change of style, and historians divide his career by them. After Shunshō died in 1793, he studied other traditions, including the rival Kanō school and European copper engravings, and he was soon pushed out of the Katsukawa school. He turned increasingly to landscapes and scenes of ordinary people. His youngest daughter, Ei, later became a painter and his assistant.

By 1800 he was working as Katsushika Hokusai, and he published collections of landscapes of Edo. Over the following decade he became a celebrity, helped by showmanship: at a festival in 1804 he painted a vast portrait of the Buddhist teacher Daruma using a broom and buckets of ink, and in 1817 he repeated the feat at a temple in Nagoya.

In 1814 he published the first volume of the Hokusai Manga, sketchbooks of people, animals, plants, objects and religious figures drawn with a light, often humorous touch. Twelve volumes had appeared by 1820. Over his career he taught around 50 pupils.

In the early 1830s, aged about 70, Hokusai produced Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. The Great Wave, in which a towering wave dwarfs boats with Fuji far behind, uses a Western-style perspective to create depth. The series was so successful that ten more prints were added. Series on waterfalls and bridges followed, and from 1834, under the name Old Man Mad About Art, the picture book One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji. In its afterword he wrote that nothing he had drawn before seventy was worth much, and hoped to keep improving until he was over a hundred.

In 1839 a fire destroyed his studio and much of his work, and younger artists such as Hiroshige were overtaking him in popularity. In his eighties he spent long periods at Obuse in Shinano Province as the guest of a wealthy patron, where he painted works including a pair of great waves. He kept working into early 1849 and died in Edo on 10 May that year, aged 88.

From the mid-19th century his prints and sketchbooks, carried out of Japan, began to reach Europe. The printmaker Félix Bracquemond came across a Hokusai sketchbook in Paris in about 1856, and Hokusai's influence can be traced in the work of the Impressionists, including Claude Monet, and in Art Nouveau. Vincent van Gogh, Degas, Gauguin and Klimt were among the artists who collected his woodcuts, and Claude Debussy is believed to have had The Great Wave in mind when writing La Mer.

Our 1800 and 1815 maps show the Tokugawa shogunate during the busiest years of Hokusai's career, and the 1878 map shows Japan a generation after his death, when the shoguns had given way to the Empire of Japan.