Works by Katsushika Hokusai

At seventy, Katsushika Hokusai began Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, a print series showing the mountain from every side, sometimes set small beyond a wave or under a bridge. He was still painting in 1849, the year he died at 88.

In the Great Wave, the crest breaks into curled claws of foam over three long boats whose rowers crouch low. Across the Fuji series, sky and water are often Berlin blue, a pigment that had only lately become cheap enough to use freely. Fuji is huge in South Wind, Clear Weather: rust-red with thin streaks of snow at the summit, it rises from a green wooded foot along the bottom, while rows of small white clouds cross the deep blue sky to its left. Hokusai did not draw such views on the spot, and here he made Fuji steeper than it is.

His way into prints ran through the trade. At 12 he worked in a bookshop that lent out woodblock books, at 14 he was apprenticed to a woodcarver, and at 18 he joined the studio of Katsukawa Shunshō, whose school drew courtesans and kabuki actors. His first prints, in 1779, were actors; later he left them for landscapes and the daily life of people high and low. He watched the cutting of his blocks closely, and once wrote to a cutter that the eyes and noses of his figures had come out in the Utagawa manner instead of his own. In Kirifuri Waterfall, a print of about 1832, water turns into pattern: it drops in long blue and white strands that fork like roots over orange and ochre rock, while travellers stand at its foot. He used at least thirty names, often changing them as his style changed; from 1834 he went by Gakyō Rōjin Manji, an old man mad about art.

Paintings on silk and paper, and ink drawings, sit among the prints. A self-portrait as a fisherman from 1835 is a surimono, a print made privately for an occasion, with metallic pigments: he leans back on a rock, rod propped against his chin, eyes on the sky, under columns of brushed writing. Thunder god, painted in 1847, puts a red figure with a ring of drums at his back high in a grey spiral of cloud spattered with ink.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Minneapolis Institute of Art.