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Katsushika
Hokusai
Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849)
was celebrated as a great print designer, book illustrator, and
painter. His works had a deep and lasting effect not only on
Japanese art but also on modern Western art. Hokusai was the
first Japanese printmaker who endeavored to show the spectrum of
human types and experiences in his work, and he was also the
first to produce a significant series of pure landscape prints.
Among the prints in Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji are some of the
most famous landscape prints in world history. Yet this and all
of Hokusai's most successful landscape print series were
commenced after his seventieth birthday.
Hokusai's synthesis of Western
and Japanese stylistic features in his landscape prints sprang
from his fifty years of experience as an artist, his exhaustive
study of all school styles of Japanese painting, and his
involvement in a revolutionary trend toward scientific analysis
that swept Japan in the 1770s and 1780s. Part of that trend
included the import and study of Dutch copper-plate etchings and
the Chinese prints from Suzhou based on them, which instructed
Japanese artists in methods of Western-style perspective.
Details in Hokusai's prints such as clouds and waves, as well
as modeling and shading, were in some cases drawn from the same
Dutch etchings. He combined these Western elements with
traditional Japanese decorative treatments of landscape
features, making a conscious effort to be dramatic and
evocative. The effects are often riveting and memorable.
Hokusai is also famous for his
personal eccentricity. He was recorded as having moved
ninety-three times, and he changed his name about thirty times.
Although his works were in demand, he lived in constant poverty
because he moved so often. Hokusai was a member of the artisan
class of commoners, the third of four ranks in Edo period (1615-1868)
Japanese society. He spent his entire life among city commoners
and recorded their lives in innumerable illustrated books and
prints. His books became instruction manuals and design
inspiration for several generations of painters, carvers of
miniature sculpture (netsuke), lacquerers, and
printmakers.
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