Hokusai was a Japanese printmaker, born in Edo in 1760, who made The Great Wave off Kanagawa in his early seventies and died in 1849 still asking heaven for more time to learn how to draw. The most surprising fact about him is how little he thought of everything he had done by then.
He signed his work with more than ten different names over four decades, and the print the world knows him by was one view in a series of Mount Fuji that was advertised in time for the New Year of 1831.
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The Great Wave is the picture people mean when they say Hokusai. He did not seem to think much of the man who made it. In 1834, in a postscript to a book of Mount Fuji views, he wrote that until the age of seventy nothing he drew was worthy of notice, and that at seventy three he was somewhat able to fathom how plants and trees grow.
By his own count, then, the Wave belongs to the years just before he started to get it right. He went on to say that at eighty he hoped to have made more progress, and that at one hundred and ten every dot and every stroke would be as though alive. He was seventy five when he wrote it.
I take that as the key to him. The picture the world kept was, in his own eyes, a stop on the way to something he did not live long enough to reach.
What You'll Discover
Why he kept changing his name.
How big he could paint.
What the men in the wave are doing.
Who his foreign client was.
Who worked beside him at the end.