Hokusai: a career beyond the Great Wave

Hokusai entered Katsukawa Shunsho’s studio in 1778 and worked as Shunro on actor prints and illustrated books. After leaving the Katsukawa school in the 1790s, he used Sori and contributed to comic-poetry books and surimono, privately commissioned prints. Hokusai, Taito and Iitsu were among his later names. Subjects and techniques overlap across these periods.

In the early nineteenth century, Hokusai used ink density and composition to organise depth and action in illustrations for yomihon, books of prose fiction. The first volume of Hokusai Manga appeared in 1814 as a drawing manual. It presents people, animals, objects and movements as drawing examples, rather than telling a story in the manner of a modern manga.

Forty-six views of Fuji

Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji places the mountain within changing weather, viewpoints and human activity. Ten further designs extended the initial thirty-six to forty-six. Waves, boats, bridges, streets and labour form subjects in their own right while their scale and placement lead the eye towards Fuji.

The Great Wave and Red Fuji

In The Great Wave off the Coast of Kanagawa, a huge foreground wave towers above the small, distant Fuji, with boats caught between the swells. Fine Wind, Clear Weather removes the human figures and gives the mountain most of the picture. The series changes the viewer’s relationship to Fuji as well as the place from which it is seen.

Publishing and workshop roles

The artist supplies a design, the publisher organises production, block cutters translate lines into wood, and printers apply colour and take impressions. A design can survive in different printing states. Paper, colour and edition therefore matter when examining an individual impression; Hokusai did not personally cut and print every sheet.

Gradation across impressions

The gradation across Fuji in Fine Wind, Clear Weather depends on the printer’s work. Impressions vary from bluish to strongly red; Chiba City Museum of Art identifies its restrained-red example, shown here, as an early impression.

Late books and paintings

One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, begun in 1834, presents Fuji through another book format. Using names including Gakyo Rojin Manji, Hokusai increasingly devoted himself to paintings while continuing drawing manuals. He painted religious, historical and bird-and-flower subjects in his final years, before his death in 1849.

Collecting and responses in the West

In the later nineteenth century, collecting, copying and publications brought his prints and drawing books into Western artistic circles. They became resources for Japonisme. National Museum of Western Art research compares figures in Hokusai Manga with artists including Degas, and sets a bamboo-screened Fuji beside Monet’s Springtime through the Branches (1878). Foreground stems dividing a distant view offered a compositional approach, alongside models for human movement and decoration.