KATSUSHIKA HOKUSAI

Hokusai was a seminal Japanese artist known for his ukiyo-e paintings and prints. Hokusai’s most iconic works include The Great Wave off Kanagawa (c. 1828­–1833) and his series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (c. 1830­–1832). “All I have produced before the age of 70 is not worth taking into account. At 73 I have learned a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes and insects,” he once said. Born Katsushika Hokusai on October 30, 1760 in Edo (present-day Tokyo), Japan, he began painting at a young age, and apprenticed to a woodcarver as a teenager. At the age of 18, he was accepted into the studio of Katsukawa Shunsho, whose paintings focused on depicting the merchant class. With the death of Shunsho in 1793, Hokusai’s work began to take on the characteristic style for which he is now known. Over the following decades, he illustrated novels and produced his famous Hokusai Manga (1814), a copybook for beginners. The artist died at the age of 88, on May 10, 1849 in Tokyo, Japan. His paintings and woodblock prints, as well as those by other Japanese artists, had a profound impact on the development of the 19th-century European painters Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, and Vincent van Gogh. Today, Hokusai’s works are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and the Sumida Hokusai Museum in Tokyo, among others.

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