Katsushika Hokusai

Katsushika Hokusai made the Great Wave and worked under some thirty names across seventy years. Born in Edo in 1760 and adopted by a mirror maker, he was apprenticed to a woodcarver and then in 1778 to the print designer Katsukawa Shunsho, whose studio he was expelled from a decade later for studying rival schools. He worked in almost every genre — actor prints, book illustration, surimono greeting cards, erotica, brush paintings — and changed his art name at each shift in direction, which is why his output is hard to track. His Manga, begun in 1814, is fifteen volumes of thousands of sketches of people, animals, buildings, ghosts and waves, produced as a drawing manual and now the best record of Japanese life of the period. The Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, published from about 1831 when he was over seventy, is his masterpiece and made his name. Fuji appears in each print, sometimes tiny and incidental. Under the Wave off Kanagawa shows a claw of water about to fall on three boats with the mountain small between its talons, and its composition, use of the imported Prussian blue, and treatment of a moment held just before it breaks made it among the most reproduced images in the world. The prints reached Europe as packing material and wrappers, and the resulting Japonisme influenced Degas, Van Gogh, Monet and Whistler directly; Debussy kept the Wave on his wall while writing La Mer. He was struck by lightning, burned out of his studio, and moved house more than ninety times. He wrote that if he lived to a hundred and ten every dot would be alive. He died in 1849.

• Lived: 1760 CE – 1849 CE
• Nationality: Japanese
• Roles: painter, printmaker