Hokusai

Born of the poor Katsushika peasant family on the outskirts of Edo, Hokusai was early apprenticed to a maker of mirrors.  Restless, he looked for something more suited to his tastes, and soon apprenticed himself to an ukiyo-e engraver.  By the age of eighteen, he was working in the prestigious studio of Katsukawa Shunsho, illustrating books under the gagō (artist’s name) of Shunro.  Over the years, he studied just about every style of art available to him, taking a new gagō for each style—over fifty of them—eventually settling on Hokusai.  He also moved his home ninety-three times during his life, and several times had disputes with seniors that got him into trouble.  Sometime after Shunsho’s death, Hokusai was kicked out of the Katsukawa school.

In the early 1820s, he began work on his masterpiece, Thirty Six Views of Mt. Fuji, later expanded to forty-six views.  Hokusai's Great Wave off Kanagawa is the first print in the original series. He published many other series, including Eight Views of Waterfalls and a series depicting each of the stations of the Tōkaidō, the government’s road between Edo and Kyōto where the emperor resided, that later influenced Hiroshige.  Among his books are One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji containing a completely different set of pictures than his earlier ones, and Hokusai Manga, an encyclopedic book on painting technique including western techniques.  Many of his landscapes are among the most famous in the world and are still influencing artists today.

At one point when using the gagō Gakyō Rōjin (old man mad about painting) Hokusai wrote:

“From the age of six I had a penchant for copying the form of things, and from about fifty, my pictures were frequently published; but until the age of seventy, nothing that I drew was worthy of notice.  At seventy-three years, I was somewhat able to fathom the growth of plants and trees, and the structure of birds, animals, insects, and fish.  Thus when I reach eighty years, I hope to have made increasing progress, and at ninety to see further into the underlying principles of things, so that at one hundred years I will have achieved a divine state in my art, and at one hundred and ten, every dot and every stroke will be as though alive.  Those of you who live long enough, bear witness that these words of mine prove not false.”

Hokusai died at the age of eighty-nine.