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Hokusai: the Great Wave that swept the

world
He called himself Old Man Crazy To Paint and made his best work in his 70s. As his
dragons, deities, poets and wrestlers go on show, we look at the obsessions of the
poster-boy for Japanese art

Thrilling seascapes Hokusais Great Wave. Photograph: British Museum

John-Paul Stonard
Friday 19 May 2017 12.51BST

H
ad Katsushika Hokusai died when he was struck by lightning at the age of 50 in
1810, he would be remembered as a popular artist of the ukiyo-e, or oating
world school of Japanese art, but hardly the great gure we know today. His
late blooming (the subject of an exhibition, Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave,
opening at the British Museum next week) was spectacular it was only in his 70s that
he made his most celebrated print series, Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, including the
famous Great Wave, an image that subsequently swept over the world. Until the age of
70, he once wrote (self-consciously parodying Confucius) nothing that I drew was
worthy of notice.

It was a good boast but not quite true he had begun his manga, woodblock print books
of sketches that were wildly popular, in his 50s. They stretched to 15 volumes (the last

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three published posthumously), and covered every subject imaginable: real and
imaginary gures and animals, plants and natural scenes, landscapes and seascapes,
dragons, poets and deities combined together in a way that dees all attempts to weave a
story around them. Leang through the manga in the original or a facsimile is a
mind-expanding experience, one that should be prescribed for all aspiring artists. In
their observation and invention they have been compared to Rembrandt and Van Gogh,
and rightly so for the thrilling panorama they provide both of the world and of Hokusais
imagination.

If the manga made Hokusais name, the Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (there are in fact
46 prints in the series) ensured his fame. Hokusais obsession with Mount Fuji was part
of his hankering after artistic immortality in Buddhist and Daoist tradition, Fuji was
thought to hold the secret of immortality, as one popular interpretation of its names
suggests: Fu-shi (not death). I saw the mountain for the rst time last year, from the
window of the Shinkansen bullet train. You quickly understand how it dominates the
landscape, as the train curves around, revealing it over woodlands and cities, behind
buildings, over the plains and why Hokusai returned to it so often, like a pivot for his
restless imagination.

Ejiri, Suruga Province, colour woodblock, early 1831.

Photograph: British Museum

Fuji appears in Thirty-Six Views in many dierent guises, sometimes centre-stage,

elsewhere as background detail. The rst ve in the series were printed entirely in
shades of blue (a combination of traditional indigo and Prussian blue, a recently
invented chemical pigment), suggesting views of the mountain at dawn, seen now from
a beach, now from a neighbouring island, now as passenger boats and cargo vessels head
out over Edo bay.

Hokusai gradually introduced colour into the series, delicate pinks and darker shadows,
to show the illumination of the world as the sun creeps up over the horizon. The print
Ejiri, Suruga Province shows early morning on a desolate patch of the Tkaid highway,
Mount Fuji drawn with a single line, while in the foreground a group of travellers are
struck by a gust of wind that sends hats and papers ying in the air. It is one of my
favourite of the Thirty-Six Views. In Japan the best-loved print is Clear Day with a
Southern Breeze. Included in the British Museum exhibition, an early impression of this
print shows the delicate atmospheric eects of sunrise, lost in later printings probably
made without Hokusais direct supervision.

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Dragon in Rain Clouds, hanging scroll, ink and colour on paper,
1849. Photograph: The Trustees of the British Museum
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Early impressions of the Great Wave, or
Under the Wave off Kanagawa, are just as
subtle in their colouring: atmospheric pink
and grey in the sky, deep Prussian blue in
the folds of the sea. Fishing skis are lost
in the waves, while the great wall of water,
with its nger-like tendrils, threatens to
engulf both them and the tiny Mount Fuji
in the distance. That the Great Wave
became the best known print in the west
was in large part due to Hokusais
formative experience of European art.
Prints from early in his career show him
attempting, rather awkwardly, to apply the
lesson of mathematical perspective, learnt
from European prints brought into Japan
by Dutch traders. By the time of Under the
Wave, the sense of deep space was far
more subtle. The rigid converging lines of
European perspective drawing become the
gently sloping sides of the sacred
mountain. In all other ways it could not
have been further from anything being
made in Europe at the time.
I would love to see an impression of
Hokusais delicately coloured print hung
next to Gricaults Raft of the Medusa,
painted just over a decade previously, in
which a similar large wave is about to
crash down on frail humanity. The
contrast, and extreme modernity of
Hokusais print, was certainly on the mind
of those post-impressionist painters who
so admired his work. You can still see
prints by Hokusai, alongside Utamaro and
Hiroshige, lining Monets dining room at
Giverny; Rodin and Van Gogh were also
enthusiastic collectors.
Hokusai signed his Thirty-Six Views with
the name Iitsu, adding for clarication that
he was the former Hokusai. It was
common in Japan, as in China, for artists
to adopt dierent names throughout their
careers, marking dierent stages of life,
and perhaps also as a way of refreshing the
brand. He adopted the name Hokusai
(North Studio) in his late 40s, when he
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became an independent artist, leaving his teaching job and striking out on his own.

By the time he created his second great tribute to Mount Fuji, three volumes comprising
One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji (in fact there were 102 views) he was using the artist
names Gaky rjin (Old Man Crazy to Paint), and Manji (Ten Thousand Things, or
Everything). There is indeed a spirit of crazy comprehensiveness to One Hundred
Views, all the mad invention and curiosity of the manga combined with the exquisite
technique of the Thirty-Six Views. Timothy Clark, the curator of the British Museum
exhibition, describes One Hundred Views as one of the greatest illustrated books ever
printed, and it is dicult to disagree. The drawings are brilliantly conceived, and the
prints beautifully made, the woodblock carvers reproducing Hokusais line so accurately
that we think we are looking at the drawings themselves, rather than carved and printed
copies.

Sumo wrestlers by Hokusai, from a collection of woodblock

print sketches begun in 1814. Photograph: Corbis via Getty

Its important to remember that Hokusai was a thoroughly commercial artist, relying on
a large turnover of sales of his low-cost prints and the many illustrated books he
produced throughout his life. Despite his artistic success, he seems to have been
permanently on the brink of bankruptcy, largely a result of nancial ineptness. After the
death of his second wife, in 1828, Hokusais daughter, Katsushika i, returned to live
with her father and provided him with support. i was herself a talented painter and
worked alongside her father in their cramped and messy studio.

An image of their situation is preserved in a memory-sketch by Tsuyuki Ksh, one of

Hokusais pupils, showing the master in rented lodgings, covered by a quilt, hunched
over an ink painting on the tatami mat. i watches him intently, smoking a long tobacco
pipe. An inscription on the drawing says that rubbish was piled in the corner of the
studio, food wrappings and other detritus. On the wall hung a sign: We strictly refuse to
paint albums or fans although you can imagine them taking on the work anyway.

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The sketch of Hokusai with his daughter i. Photograph:

British Museum

The small handful of is paintings that survive show her prodigious talent as an artist.
Recent research has shown how she might have contributed to her fathers late
paintings, which contain elements of her style such as elongated ngers, and depictions
of beautiful courtesans (drawn from life in the pleasure district of Yoshiwara, if the 2015
anime lm Miss Hokusai is anything to go by).

One of her most impressive paintings, Hua Tuo Operating on the Arm of Guan Yu, a scene
from the Chinese historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, has a violent intensity
and macabre quality quite unlike her fathers painting. Blood spurts from the arm of the
general Guan Yu, who has taken nothing but a bowl of rice wine as anaesthetic, and
continues with a game of go. It is one of the few authenticated paintings by i, who
disappears from the records following her fathers death in 1849.

Set alongside his prints, Hokusais rarely exhibited late paintings large hanging scrolls
on silk and paper strike a dierent note. The subjects are often fantastical: a great
dragon writhes in a rain cloud rising above Mount Fuji; a seven-headed dragon deity ies
in the sky above the monk Nichiren (Hokusai was a devout follower), sitting on a
mountain top reading from a sutra scroll.

In small reproduction (the only form I have seen them in), they can appear a little like
commercial illustrations, lacking the sense of emotional and atmospheric depth of his
prints. A grinning tiger bounding through the snow, painted just a few months before
Hokusais death, looks almost too quaint and jolly. All the more reason to make the

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journey to the British Museum and see

them in the esh. As with Hokusais prints,
the real qualities of colour and surface, of
detailed brushwork and painstaking
construction, reveal themselves only on
close and lingering inspection.

In his 80s, Hokusai was said to draw a

Chinese lion or lion dancer every morning,
throwing it out of the window to ward o
ill luck. A number of these daily
exorcism drawings still exist (probably
thanks to i running out to collect them
up), and they are among his most lively
and charming works. Hokusais only bad
luck was to die 10 years short of his
century, and never in his own mind to
reach the state of artistic immortality,
which he estimated would occur at the age
of 110 when, as he once wrote, Each dot,
each line, will possess a life of its own.

Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave is at the

British Museum, London WC1B, from 25
May to 13 August, and at the Abeno
Harukas Art Museum, Osaka, from 6
October to 19 November.

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Hua Tuo Operating on the Arm of Guan Yu, by Katsushika i.
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