Hokusai, Katsushika (1760-1849) - Cuckoo & Azalea 1828

This Japanese wood-block print, or ukiyo-e, is by renowned artist Hokusai (1760-1849).

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Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), known mononymously as Hokusai, was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist of the Edo period, active as a painter and printmaker. His woodblock print series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji includes the iconic print The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Hokusai was instrumental in developing ukiyo-e from a style of portraiture largely focused on courtesans and actors into a much broader style of art that focused on landscapes, plants, and animals. His works had a significant influence on Vincent van Gogh and Claude Monet during the wave of Japonisme that spread across Europe in the late 19th century.

Hokusai created the monumental Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji as a response to a domestic travel boom in Japan and as part of a personal interest in Mount Fuji. It was this series, specifically, The Great Wave off Kanagawa and Fine Wind, Clear Morning, that secured his fame both in Japan and overseas.

Hokusai was best known for his woodblock ukiyo-e prints, but he worked in a variety of mediums including painting and book illustration. Starting as a young child, he continued working and improving his style until his death, aged 88. In a long and successful career, Hokusai produced over 30,000 paintings, sketches, woodblock prints, and images for picture books. Innovative in his compositions and exceptional in his drawing technique, Hokusai is considered one of the greatest masters in the history of art.

Hokusai was known by at least thirty names during his lifetime. While the use of multiple names was a common practice of Japanese artists of the time, his number of pseudonyms exceeds that of any other major Japanese artist. His name changes are so frequent, and so often related to changes in his artistic production and style, that they are used for breaking his life up into periods.

At the age of 12, his father sent him to work in a bookshop and lending library, a popular institution in Japanese cities, where reading books made from woodcut blocks was a popular entertainment of the middle and upper classes. At 14, he worked as an apprentice to a woodcarver, until the age of 18, when he entered the studio of Katsukawa Shunshō. Shunshō was an artist of ukiyo-e, a style of woodblock prints and paintings that Hokusai would master, and head of the so-called Katsukawa school. Ukiyo-e, as practiced by artists like Shunshō, focused on images of the courtesans (bijin-ga) and kabuki actors (yakusha-e) who were popular in Japan's cities at the time.

After a year, Hokusai's name changed for the first time, when he was dubbed Shunrō by his master. It was under this name that he published his first prints, a series of pictures of kabuki actors published in 1779. During the decade he worked in Shunshō's studio, Hokusai was married to his first wife, about whom very little is known except that she died in the early 1790s. He married again in 1797, although this second wife also died after a short time. He fathered two sons and three daughters with these two wives, and his youngest daughter Ei, also known as Ōi, eventually became an artist and his assistant. 

Hokusai had achievements in various fields as an artist. He made designs for book illustrations and woodblock prints, sketches, and painting for over 70 years. Hokusai was an early experimenter with Western linear perspective among Japanese artists. Hokusai himself was influenced by Sesshū Tōyō and other styles of Chinese painting. His influence stretches across the globe to his Western contemporaries in nineteenth-century Europe with Japonism, which started with a craze for collecting Japanese art, particularly ukiyo-e. Some of the first samples were to be seen in Paris, when in about 1856, the French printmaker, designer and colleague of many Impressionsist artists such as Édouard Manet, Félix Bracquemond first came across a copy of a Hokusai sketchbook at the workshop of August Dalatre, his printer.

With the sketchbook as his influence Bracquemond designed the "Rousseau Service", an elegant set of dinnerware, on behalf of Francois-Eugene Rousseau, the owner of a glass and ceramics shop. Exhibited at the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1867, the Rousseau Service was a success both critically and commercially and was reissued in several editions over the years. The Rousseau Service featured images of birds and fish copied from the Japanese book illustrations and placed asymmetrically against a white background for a look that would have been very modern at that time.

Hokusai also influenced the Impressionism movement, with themes echoing his work appearing in the work of Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, as well as Art Nouveau, or Jugendstil in Germany. His woodcuts were collected by many European artists, including Degas, Gauguin, Klimt, Franz Marc, August Macke, Édouard Manet, and van Gogh. Degas said of him, "Hokusai is not just one artist among others in the Floating World. He is an island, a continent, a whole world in himself". Hermann Obrist's whiplash motif, or Peitschenhieb, which came to exemplify the new movement, is visibly influenced by Hokusai's work.

The French composer Claude Debussy's tone poem La Mer, which debuted in 1905, is believed to have been inspired by Hokusai's print The Great Wave. The composer had an impression of it hanging in his living room and specifically requested that it be used on the cover of the published score, which was widely distributed, and the music itself incorporated Japanese-inflected harmonies.