Katsushika Hokusai

As he wandered through Edo’s artistic landscape, Hokusai changed his name with a frequency that baffled his contemporaries. Over his eighty-eight years, he would use at least thirty different pseudonyms, each marking a distinct shift in his aesthetic philosophy. In 1800, he adopted the name Katsushika Hokusai—"North Studio"—paying homage both to the district of his birth and to the North Star, a central deity in his Nichiren Buddhist faith. Under this name, he began publishing landscapes that moved beyond the theater districts to capture the lived reality of Japan: fishermen casting nets, travelers struggling against the wind, and peasants hauling timber.

By the 1810s, Hokusai’s reputation was such that he was flooded with students. In response, he began publishing the Hokusai Manga in 1814. These "random drawings" were originally intended as quick, simplified instructional manuals for aspiring painters, but they soon exploded into a multi-volume publishing phenomenon. Within their pages, Hokusai cataloged the world with exhaustive, manic energy: fat wrestling coaches, bathing women, diving beetles, wind-twisted trees, ghosts, and mythical monsters. The Manga revealed an artist who viewed the entire universe as worthy of study, laying the groundwork for the monumental landscapes that would define his old age.

That old age yielded his most famous work. In the early 1830s, now working under the name Iitsu, Hokusai responded to a domestic travel boom in Japan by publishing Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. The series was a revolution in color and composition. Utilizing a newly imported, chemically stable pigment known as Prussian blue, Hokusai rendered the sacred volcano from dozens of unexpected angles: peeking through the timbers of a half-built temple, framed by the legs of a cooper working on a giant tub, or glowing red under a summer sky in Fine Wind, Clear Morning.

The masterwork of the series, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, remains one of the most recognized images in human history. Here, Hokusai’s decades of experimenting with Western perspective culminated in a terrifyingly dynamic composition. The viewer is suspended low on the water, staring into the maw of a towering, claw-like wave that threatens to swallow three fragile cargo boats. In the background, tiny and serene, sits Mount Fuji, its triangular form mirrored by the shape of the wave’s crest. It is an image of profound tension—the transient, violent power of the ocean contrasted with the immutable stillness of the mountain. The series was so immensely popular that the publisher demanded ten additional prints, bringing the total of the "Thirty-Six Views" to forty-six.

Hokusai followed this success with other brilliant landscape series, including A Tour of the Waterfalls of the Provinces and Unusual Views of Celebrated Bridges in the Provinces, before retreating into an even more personal project. In 1834, adopting the moniker Gakyō Rōjin Manji—"The Old Man Mad About Art"—he published One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji. In the colophon to this book, he wrote a famous, touching manifesto on his lifelong pursuit of perfection. He confessed that nothing he had produced before the age of seventy was truly worth taking into account. "At seventy-three years I partly understood the structure of animals, birds, insects and fishes, and the life of grasses and plants," he wrote. "And so, at eighty-six I shall progress further; at ninety I shall even further penetrate their secret meaning, and by one hundred I shall perhaps truly have reached the level of the marvellous and divine."

He did not reach one hundred, dying in the spring of 1849 at the age of eighty-eight. Yet, in his final decades, aided by his daughter and assistant Ōi—herself an accomplished artist who worked in his shadow—he produced tens of thousands of paintings and sketches. His final drawings, preserved in works like The Great Picture Book of Everything, showed no loss of vigor, capturing scenes of Buddhist India and ancient China with the same precise, fluid line that had defined his youth.

The world Hokusai left behind was on the cusp of radical change. Within a few decades of his death, the isolation of Tokugawa Japan would end, and his prints, often used as packing material for porcelain shipped to Europe, would find their way into the hands of the Parisian avant-garde. Artists like Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, and Edgar Degas would find in Hokusai’s asymmetrical compositions, flat planes of color, and focus on everyday life a liberation from the rigid rules of academic Western painting. In trying to capture the soul of Japan’s sacred mountain, the old man mad about art had rewritten the visual vocabulary of the world.