Born Tokitarō. Adopted into the Nakajima family (Father: Nakajima Ise, a mirror-maker). He used over 30 pseudonyms throughout his career. His daughter, Katsushika Ōi (Eijo), was also a highly skilled artist who worked closely with him.
Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) was a brilliant Japanese artist, ukiyo-e painter, and printmaker of the Edo period. He is arguably Japan’s most internationally recognized artist, profoundly influencing Western art movements such as Impressionism and Art Nouveau (a phenomenon known as Japonisme).
Born in the artisan district of Edo, Hokusai began painting around age six. At 14, he apprenticed as a woodblock carver, and at 18, he was accepted into the studio of Katsukawa Shunshō, a master of ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”). While ukiyo-e traditionally focused on courtesans and kabuki actors, Hokusai eventually broke away from these conventions to broaden the genre, focusing intensely on landscapes, flora, fauna, and the daily lives of ordinary people.
Throughout his long and eccentric life, Hokusai relocated over 90 times and frequently changed his artistic name to mark new phases in his career. In 1814, he began publishing the Hokusai Manga, a sprawling 15-volume collection of thousands of sketches depicting animals, people, everyday objects, and mythological figures. These served as drawing manuals for his students and became wildly popular with the general public.
His undisputed masterpiece is the woodblock print series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (c. 1830–1832), created when he was in his seventies. This monumental series includes The Great Wave off Kanagawa, an iconic image that captures the awe-inspiring, claw-like power of the ocean juxtaposed with the distant, serene peak of Mount Fuji. In this series, he masterfully utilized Prussian blue, a recently imported synthetic pigment, to create deep, vibrant, and expressive waters.
Hokusai was relentlessly driven by his art. On his deathbed at age 88, he reportedly lamented, “If heaven had granted me five more years, I could have become a real painter.” His legacy remains monumental, with his works avidly collected and studied by European masters like Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Vincent van Gogh.
Active in others filds : Book Illustration, Shunga (Erotic Art), Drawing Manuals (Hokusai Manga), Poetry Illustration.
