Katsushika Hokusai
1760–1849Japanese · Ukiyo-e (Floating World) 1680–1880
He produced the single most reproduced image in the history of art, changed his artistic name at least thirty times, and wrote at seventy-five that nothing he had made before the age of seventy was worth counting.
Formation
Apprenticed to a woodblock carver and then to the ukiyo-e master Katsukawa Shunshō in Edo. He was expelled from that school and spent decades working across every available genre — actor prints, book illustration, surimono greetings, erotica, sketchbooks — before the Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji appeared around 1831, when he was over seventy. He produced the Hokusai Manga, fifteen volumes of some four thousand sketches of everything from wrestlers to raindrops, which functioned as a drawing manual and circulated widely.
Technique
Ukiyo-e is a collaborative industrial process, not a solo one. The artist supplies a brush drawing; a carver pastes it face-down onto a cherrywood block and cuts through the paper, destroying the original; a separate block is cut for each colour, with registration marks to align them; a printer inks the blocks by hand with a brush and applies the paper with a baren, adjusting pressure to grade a tone within a single impression. A publisher finances and directs the whole. The gradations in the sky of the Great Wave are produced by the printer wiping the block, not by the designer.
The palette
Prussian blue, and it arrived just in time. Imported through Dutch traders at Nagasaki and available cheaply in Japan by around 1830, it gave printmakers a stable, intense blue that the traditional vegetable dyes could not match — the previous blue, dayflower, faded almost immediately. The Thirty-Six Views exploits it systematically, and several designs are printed in blue alone. Alongside it, traditional colours: safflower red, orpiment yellow, indigo and carbon black, with the paper left bare for white.
Legacy
Japanese prints reached Paris in quantity after 1853 and reorganised European picture-making: flat colour, cropped composition, asymmetry, high viewpoint and the treatment of a subject as a series all enter Impressionism from here. Monet owned over two hundred and had them in his house at Giverny. The Great Wave is now so ubiquitous that it functions as a symbol independent of anything Hokusai intended.
Palette
The colours reconstructed for this artist, with the reasoning behind each.
Pigments used: Prussian blue · Vermilion · Red lead