27/02/2012 13:50:15 -

Hokusai was born on the 23rd day of 9th month of the 10th year of
the Hōreki period (October or November 1760) to an artisan family, in
the Katsushika district of Edo, Japan. His childhood name was Tokitarō.
It is believed his father was the mirror-maker Nakajima Ise, who
produced mirrors for the shogun. His father never made Hokusai an heir,
so it's possible that his mother was a concubine. Hokusai began
painting around the age of six, possibly learning the art from his
father, whose work on mirrors also included the painting of designs
around the mirrors.
Hokusai was known by at least 30 names during his lifetime. Although
the use of multiple names was a common practice of Japanese artists of
the time, the numbers of names he used far exceeds that of any other
major Japanese artist. Hokusai's name changes are so frequent, and so
often related to changes in his artistic production and style, that
they are useful for breaking his life up into periods.
At the age of 12, he was sent by his father to work in a bookshop
and lending library, a popular type of institution in Japanese cities,
where reading books made from wood-cut blocks was a popular
entertainment of the middle and upper classes. At 14, he became an
apprentice to a wood-carver, where he worked until the age of 18,
whereupon he was accepted into the studio of Katsukawa Shunshō. Shunshō
was an artist of ukiyo-e, a style of wood block prints and paintings
that Hokusai would master, and head of the so-called Katsukawa school.
Ukiyo-e, as practiced by artists like Shunshō, focused on images of the
courtesans and Kabuki actors who were popular in Japan's cities at the
time.

After a year, Hokusai's name changed for the first time, when he was
dubbed Shunrō by his master. It was under this name that he published
his first prints, a series of pictures of Kabuki actors published in
1779. During the decade he worked in Shunshō's studio, Hokusai was
married to his first wife, about whom very little is known except that
she died in the early 1790s. He would marry again in 1797, although
this second wife also died after a short time. He fathered two sons and
three daughters with these two wives, and his youngest daughter Oyei
eventually became an artist like her father.
Upon the death of Shunshō in 1793, Hokusai began exploring other
styles of art, including European styles he was exposed to through
French and Dutch copper engravings he was able to acquire. He was soon
expelled from the Katsukawa school by Shunkō, the chief disciple of
Shunshō, possibly due to studies at the rival Kanō school. This event
was, in his own words, inspirational: "What really motivated the
development of my artistic style was the embarrassment I suffered at
Shunkō's hands."
Hokusai also changed the subjects of his works, moving away from the
images of courtesans and actors that were the traditional subjects of
ukiyo-e. Instead, his work became focused on landscapes and images of
the daily life of Japanese people from a variety of social levels. This
change of subject was a breakthrough in ukiyo-e and in Hokusai's career.

Height of his career

The next period saw Hokusai's association with the Tawaraya School
and the adoption of the name "Tawaraya Sōri." He produced many brush
paintings, called surimono, and illustrations for kyōka ehon during
this time. In 1798, Hokusai passed his name on to a pupil and set out
as an independent artist , free from ties to a school for the first
time, adopting the name Hokusai Tomisa.
By 1800, Hokusai was further developing his use of ukiyo-e for
purposes other than portraiture. He had also adopted the name he would
most widely be known by, Katsushika Hokusai, the former name referring
to the part of Edo where he was born and the latter meaning, 'north
studio'. That year, he published two collections of landscapes, Famous
Sights of the Eastern Capital and Eight Views of Edo. He also began to
attract students of his own, eventually teaching 50 pupils over the
course of his life.
He became increasingly famous over the next decade, both due to his
artwork and his talent for self-promotion. During a Tokyo festival in
1804, he created a portrait of the Buddhist priest Daruma said to be
600 feet (180 m) long using a broom and buckets full of ink. Another
story places him in the court of the Shogun Iyenari, invited there to
compete with another artist who practiced more traditional brush stroke
painting. Hokusai's painting, created in front of the Shogun, consisted
of painting a blue curve on paper, then chasing a chicken across it
whose feet had been dipped in red paint. He described the painting to
the Shogun as a landscape showing the Tatsuta River with red maple
leaves floating in it, winning the competition.
1807 saw Hokusai collaborate with the popular novelist Takizawa
Bakin on a series of illustrated books. The two did not get along due
to artistic differences, and their collaboration ended during work on
their fourth. The publisher, given the choice between keeping Hokusai
or Bakin on the project, opted to keep Hokusai, emphasizing the
importance of illustrations in printed works of the period.
In 1811, at the age of 51, Hokusai changed his name to Taito and
entered the period in which he created the Hokusai Manga and various
etehon, or art manuals. These etehon, beginning in 1812 with Quick
Lessons in Simplified Drawing, served as a convenient way to make money
and attract more students. The first book of Hokusai's manga, sketches
or caricatures that influenced the modern form of comics known by the
same name, was published in 1814. Together, his 12 volumes of manga
published before 1820 and three more published posthumously include
thousands of drawings of animals, religious figures, and everyday
people. They often have humorous overtones, and were very popular at
the time.
In 1820, Hokusai changed his name yet again, this time to "Iitsu," a
change which marked the start of a period in which he secured fame as
an artist throughout Japan (though, given Japan's isolation from the
outside world during his lifetime, his fame overseas came after his
death). It was during the 1820s that Hokusai reached the peak of his
career. His most famous work, 36 Views of Mount Fuji, including the
famous Great Wave off Kanagawa, dated from this period. It proved so
popular that Hokusai later added ten more prints to the series. Among
the other popular series of prints he published during this time are A
Tour of the Waterfalls of the Provinces and Unusual Views of Celebrated
Bridges in the Provinces. He also began producing a number of detailed
individual images of flowers and birds, including the extraordinarily
detailed Poppies and Flock of Chickens.

Later life

The next period, beginning in 1834, saw Hokusai working under the
name "Gakyō Rōjin Manji" (The Old Man Mad About Art). It was at this
time that Hokusai produced One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, another
significant landscape series.
In the postscript to this work, Hokusai writes:
“ From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I
became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some
reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of
attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds
and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on
trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am
eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential
nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine
understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more
I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint
will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to
prove that this is no lie. ”
In 1839, disaster struck as a fire destroyed Hokusai's studio and
much of his work. By this time, his career was beginning to wane as
younger artists such as Andō Hiroshige became increasingly popular. But
Hokusai never stopped painting, and completed Ducks in a Stream at the
age of 87.
Constantly seeking to produce better work, he apparently exclaimed
on his deathbed, "If only Heaven will give me just another ten years...
Just another five more years, then I could become a real painter." He
died on April 18, 1849, and was buried at the Seikyō-ji in Tokyo (Taito
Ward).
A short four years after Hokusai's death, an American fleet led by
Matthew C. Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay and forced Japan to open its
arms to the west. Hokusai's career spanned the last age of Japanese
history before its interaction with the west would change the course of
the nation.

Works and influences

Hokusai had a long career, but he produced most of his important
work after age 60. His most popular work is the ukiyo-e series
Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, which was created between 1826 and
1833. It actually consists of 46 prints (10 of them added after
publication). In addition, he is responsible for the 1834 One Hundred
Views of Mount Fuji (富嶽百景 Fugaku Hyakkei), a work which "is generally
considered the masterpiece among his landscape picture books." His
ukiyo-e transformed the art form from a style of portraiture focused on
the courtesans and actors popular during the Edo Period in Japan's
cities into a much broader style of art that focused on landscapes,
plants, and animals.
Both Hokusai’s choice of nom d'artiste and frequent depiction of Mt.
Fuji stem from his religious beliefs. The name Hokusai means "North
Studio (room)," (北斎） an abbreviation of Hokushinsai (北辰際) or "North
Star Studio." Hokusai was a member of the Nichiren sect of Buddhism.
For Nichiren followers, the North Star is associated with the deity
Myōken (妙見菩薩). Mount Fuji has traditionally been linked with eternal
life. This belief can be traced to the The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter,
where a goddess deposits the elixir of life on the peak. As Henry Smith
expounds, "Thus from an early time, Mt. Fuji was seen as the source of
the secret of immortality, a tradition that was at the heart of
Hokusai's own obsession with the mountain."
The largest of Hokusai's works is the 15-volume collection Hokusai
Manga (北斎漫画), a book crammed with nearly 4,000 sketches that was
published in 1814. These sketches are often incorrectly considered the
precedent to modern manga, as Hokusai's Manga is a collection of
sketches (of animals, people, objects, etc.), different from the
story-based comic-book style of modern manga.