Most of the pictures people call Hokusai paintings are not paintings at all. His name is on them, but they are woodblock prints: carvers cut the wood and printers pulled the sheets for a publisher in Edo. He also worked with the brush, on silk and on paper, and once he was old he wrote his age beside his signature, year after year.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (140+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
What Edo Paid Hokusai to Make
Hokusai earned his living from the market of Edo, today's Tokyo. Publishers paid him for portraits of kabuki actors, for illustrations in printed books and, from around the age of seventy, for series of landscapes. A painting was a different kind of job: a single work made by his own hand for a single owner.
Because he never gave up any of these three trades, a fair account of his work has to mix prints, illustrated books and paintings. He illustrated more than 200 printed books, and at eighty-nine he was still painting scrolls.
These twelve span his working years, from the prints he signed as a pupil under another name to the scrolls of his final years. Alongside the landscapes everyone knows, they take in what he made before those landscapes and what he made after them.
12. Ejiri in Suruga Province (about 1830 to 1832)
A gust has just crossed a marsh path in Ejiri in Suruga Province, and everything loose is in the air. Paper tissues stream out of a woman's kimono, a hat sails away, and the travelers bend into the wind with their faces turned aside. Mount Fuji, far off, is only a single outline on the horizon.
That thin outline comes as a surprise, because the sheet comes from a set named after the mountain, the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, begun by Hokusai around 1830, at about seventy. In this sheet the mountain plays "a backstage role", in the words of Timothy Clark, a curator at the British Museum. What Hokusai draws is the wind, through everything it carries away.
Clark also points to a smaller detail, easy to miss. The porter whose hat has gone throws up his arms, and all that is left on his head is the ring of padding he wore under it.
In 1993, some 160 years on, the Canadian photographer Jeff Wall moved the scene to a cranberry bog outside Vancouver. His A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) is a color transparency nearly four meters wide, lit from behind in a lightbox, in which papers fly and walkers lean into the wind just as they do in the print.
For me it is the best tribute the print has received, because of the way it was made. The scene looks like an instant caught by the camera, yet Wall composed it digitally and assembled it piece by piece.
At a Glance
Artist: Katsushika Hokusai (1760 to 1849)
Made: About 1830 to 1832
Medium: Woodblock print, ink and color on paper
Size: 25.4 × 37.1 cm (10 × 14 5/8 in)
Where to see it: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, among other collections
11. Thunder God (1847)
High in a tall, narrow scroll, a muscular figure with a ring of drums on his back hovers among black clouds spattered with ink. The scroll hangs in a museum in Washington, and under a rule set more than a century ago, it may never leave the building.