Katsushika Hokusai

Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) changed his name at least thirty times. He changed addresses ninety-three times. What he never changed was his obsession with drawing. Born in Edo (now Tokyo), the son of a mirror-maker to the shogun, he was apprenticed to a block-cutter at fourteen and entered the studio of ukiyo-e master Katsukawa Shunshō at nineteen.

For the next seven decades, he never stopped working. By his own estimate, he produced over 30,000 paintings, sketches, woodblock prints, and illustrated books. His drawing manuals, the fifteen-volume Hokusai Manga (1814–78), became a sensation, influencing artists from Manet to Van Gogh. He drew everything: ghosts, bridges, waterfalls, wrestlers, courtesans, mountains. Especially mountains.

The Great Wave off Kanagawa (c. 1831), from his series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, is possibly the most reproduced image in art history. Three fishing boats struggle against a towering wave while Fuji sits calmly in the distance. Hokusai was around seventy when he made it. He'd borrowed a new pigment from Europe: Prussian blue. The combination of Japanese composition and Western materials created something unprecedented. In his seventies, he wrote: "From the age of six, I had a mania for drawing... When I am eighty I shall have made still more progress. At ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of things. At a hundred I shall have reached a marvelous stage." He died at eighty-nine, reportedly saying, "If heaven would give me just ten more years... I could become a real painter." His work is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, and the Sumida Hokusai Museum in Tokyo.