Hokusai

The great painter, book illustrator and print designer Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) has become the best known of all Japanese artists and one of the most famous and influential artists in the world. He was a key figure for the Japonisme movement in late 19th-century Europe, and his iconic images—especially the color woodblock print nicknamed “The Great Wave”—are frequently referred to in present-day art in both serious and frivolous forms, from sculpture, printmaking and painting to anime and emojis.
This book looks at Hokusai from the viewpoint of fellow artists who incorporated lessons learned from him into their own work, including Hokusai’s own students, his contemporary rivals and his many posthumous admirers working in a wide range of mediums, in Japan and around the world, from the late 19th century to the present. Lavishly illustrated and accompanied by illuminating and engaging texts, this publication invites readers to encounter the origins and enduring appeal of Hokusai’s delightful art.
Artists include: Félix Bracquemond, John Cederquist, Arthur Wesley Dow, Hiroshige, Sori Hishikawa, Hokkei, Hokusai, Winslow Homer, Loïs Mailou Jones, Henri Gustave Jossot, Shun’ei Katsukawa, Shunsho Katsukawa, Oi Katsushika, Eisen Keisai, Korin, Kuniyoshi, Paul Legrand, Manjiro Hokuga, Ogata Korin, Odilon Redon, Henri Rivière, Hoitsu Sakai, Hokuju Shotei, Hokushu Shunkosai, Kogan Tobari, Hokkei Totoya, Toyoharu Utagawa, Utamasa, Édouard Vuillard, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Samuel Wilson and Shigenobu Yanagawa.

The best known of all Japanese artists, Katsushika Hokusai was active as a painter, book illustrator and print designer throughout his 90-year lifespan. Yet his most famous works—the color woodblock landscape prints issued in series—were produced within a relatively short time, in an amazing burst of creative energy that lasted from about 1830 to 1836.

Hokusai’s landscapes revolutionized Japanese printmaking and became icons of world art within a few decades of the artist’s death. Hokusai’s Landscapes focuses exclusively on this pivotal body of the artist’s work, the first book to do so. Featuring stunning color reproductions of works from the incomparable Japanese art collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (the largest collection of Japanese prints outside Japan), Hokusai’s Landscapes examines the magnetic appeal of Hokusai’s designs and the circumstances of their creation.

The book includes all published prints of the artist’s eight major landscape series: Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (1830–32), A Tour of Waterfalls in Various Provinces (1833–34), Snow, Moon and Flowers (1833), Eight Views of the Ryukyu Islands (1832–33), One Thousand Pictures of the Ocean (1832–33), Remarkable Views of Bridges in Various Provinces (1834), A True Mirror of Chinese and Japanese Poetry (1833) and One Hundred Poems Explained by the Nurse (1835).

Working prolifically in the years just before Japan opened to the West in 1853, Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) was the first Japanese artist to be internationally recognized. His cleverly composed ukiyo-e prints of everyday life and the landscapes of Edo Japan arrived in a 19th-century Europe gripped by Japonisme-mania, where they influenced artists such as Degas, Gauguin, Manet and Van Gogh.

The undisputed master of ukiyo-e, Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) is celebrated not only for his series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji but also for his great versatility expressed in his treatment of all types of subjects: from landscapes to nature, portraits of kabuki actors, beautiful women, warriors and even ghosts and spirits, semilegendary beings and animals. Hokusai is also associated with restless change: of residence, of name (more than 30!) and of style. He had dozens of followers, and each of them represents an aspect of the master’s vast oeuvre. These include Shinsai, Hokkei and Gakutei, who in turn influenced the following generation of artists.

Through a selection of over 250 works from the Municipal Museum of Chiba and other Japanese collections, this publication offers a reading of Hokusai that also includes his legacy, accompanying and comparing his output with that of others who followed in his footsteps and gave life to new lines, forms and balances of color within the classic themes of ukiyo-e.

Rediscovered in an old box in the storage rooms of the museum, these Hokusai drawings should have been used to create the woodblocks for printing a continuation of his Manga series. But although scholars have found an advertisement announcing the title, there is no record of the book ever having been produced.
Ironically, if the book had actually been published, the drawings would have been destroyed in the woodblock cutting process. Instead, presumably after the decision was made not to publish the book, the drawings were folded and bound together. And so they stayed for nearly two centuries.
Author Sarah E. Thompson, Curator of Japanese Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has studied the pages in depth for the first time, annotating them to help readers discover these drawings in Hokusai's own hand for themselves.
Although Hokusai is most famous today for the color woodblock prints that he made at the end of his life, he was best known during his own times as a popular book illustrator. Hokusai’s Lost Manga includes the sort of lively, behind-the-scenes sketches of daily life that have made the Hokusai Manga so beloved, with appearances by imaginatively conceived sea creatures, refined flowers, heroes and a variety of craftspeople and laborers. Hokusai fans will find prototypes of many of the people and animals that populate the Japanese master’s later landscape prints. The book also includes an especially interesting series of fabulous astrological deities may reflect Hokusai’s practice of Nichiren Buddhism and his devotion to the Bodhisattva Myōken.
Hokusai: The Lost Manga will delight – and intrigue – admirers of Hokusai’s prints as well as Manga collectors.

Artist and printmaker Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) made some of the most iconic images in Japanese art, such as the seminal woodblock print “Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave).” Already influential in Japan, Hokusai inspired a new audience of budding Impressionists and post-Impressionists in the West upon the opening of Japan to Europe shortly after his death.