Katsushika Hokusai

The life of Katsushika Hokusai,
scene by scene

1. 1760Edo

   Katsushika Hokusai was born in 1760 in Edo, today's Tokyo, in the Katsushika district across the Sumida River on the city's east side. The Katsushika he would put in front of his names was the name of this home ground. From childhood, by his own later account, he copied the shapes of whatever he saw.

2. 1779Edo

   At about eighteen he became a pupil of Katsukawa Shunshō, known for prints of kabuki actors. The next year he put out actor prints of his own under the name Shunrō. Over his life he went on to use more than thirty artist names. Hokusai was only one of them. Each new name seemed to come with a fresh start in his art.

3. 1814Nagoya

   A Nagoya publisher brought out the first volume of Hokusai Manga. Its pages are crammed with sketches dashed off with the brush: people laughing, tumbling, wrestling, along with fish, birds, and ghosts. It was a model book for pupils and anyone who wanted to learn to draw, and more volumes kept appearing for decades.

4. 1830–32Edo

   Now past seventy, Hokusai published Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, a series of prints showing the mountain from many places. One of them is Under the Wave off Kanagawa. A huge wave, its foam breaking into white claws, rears over three boats, and far below sits Mount Fuji, a small triangle. The series used Prussian blue, a deep blue pigment imported from Europe. The signature at upper left means "Hokusai, changing his name to Iitsu."

   Painted around this timeUnder the Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki nami ura), also known as The Great Wave, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei)
5. 1834Edo

   He published a picture book, One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, and added a short afterword. He wrote that he had loved copying the shapes of things since he was six, but that nothing he drew before seventy was worth much. At seventy-three, he said, he had begun to grasp how birds, beasts, insects, and fish are built and how plants grow. And he wrote that by the age of one hundred and ten, every dot and every line he drew would seem alive.

6. 1845Obuse

   Past eighty, Hokusai made several trips over the mountains to Obuse, a small town in Shinano province. There a wealthy admirer, Takai Kōzan, welcomed him. Hokusai painted swirling waves on the ceiling of a festival float for the town. A mountain village with no sea got waves of its own.

7. 1849Edo

   In 1849 Hokusai died in Edo at nearly ninety. According to a biography written later, near the end he said that if heaven would give him just five more years, he could become a true painter. The one who looked after him in his last years, and painted alongside him, was his daughter Ōi, herself a painter.