Thirty names, one wave, and a lifelong Fuji obsession
Katsushika Hokusai, about 31 October 1760 to 10 May 1849, cut The Great Wave off Kanagawa inside Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. At least thirty names marked a career that chased landscapes and common life until age eighty-eight.
Even Hokusai's birth is uncertain: the usual date, the 23rd day of the 9th month of Horeki 10, converts to 31 October 1760, in the Katsushika district of Edo. He was called Tokitaro as a child and was probably the son of Nakajima Ise, a mirror-maker to the shogun, though he was never made his heir. At twelve he was sent to work in a lending library, at fourteen apprenticed to a woodcarver, and at eighteen he entered the studio of the ukiyo-e master Katsukawa Shunsho, who renamed him Shunro. Under that name he published his first prints, kabuki actors, in 1779.
He used at least thirty names in all, more than any other major Japanese artist, and scholars divide his career by them. After Shunsho died in 1793 he explored the rival Kano school and European copper engravings, and was thrown out of the Katsukawa workshop by its senior disciple Shunko; he later said that humiliation drove his development. He turned from courtesans and actors toward landscapes and ordinary people of every class. By 1800 he was signing as Katsushika Hokusai, the second part meaning north studio in honour of the North Star, revered in his Nichiren Buddhism.
He was also a showman. At an Edo festival in 1804 he painted a portrait of the monk Daruma said to cover 200 square metres, using a broom and buckets of ink, and in Nagoya on 5 October 1817 he repeated the stunt at 18 by 10.8 metres. From 1804 to 1815 he illustrated thirteen books with the novelist Takizawa Bakin before the pair fell out, and in 1814 the first volume of his sketchbook Manga appeared and sold at once.
Renamed Iitsu in 1820, he produced Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji in the early 1830s, feeding a boom in domestic travel. The Great Wave off Kanagawa borrows Western-style perspective to suggest depth. He kept working until his death at 88, leaving over 30,000 images, and later influenced Van Gogh and Monet.
Source: Hokusai
