Katsushika Hokusai: An Ocean of Invention

Ninety Years, Thirty Names

Katsushika Hokusai was born in Edo — present-day Tokyo — in 1760 and died in 1849 at the age of eighty-eight or eighty-nine. He changed his artistic name more than thirty times during his career, a practice common in Japanese artistic culture but which Hokusai pursued with unusual frequency, often to mark a new phase of work or a new ambition. He was apprenticed to a mirror-polisher, then to a wood-block cutter, before entering the studio of the ukiyo-e master Katsukawa Shunsho at about eighteen. Ukiyo-e — pictures of the floating world — was a commercial art form serving an urban middle class hungry for images of actors, wrestlers, landscapes, and beautiful women. Hokusai worked within it and eventually burst through its walls.

The Great Wave

"The Great Wave off Kanagawa" is among the most instantly recognisable images ever made. It appeared around 1831 as the first plate in the series "Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji" — a set of woodblock prints depicting the sacred mountain from different distances, seasons, and vantage points. In the foreground, three fishing boats plunge into a trough between enormous waves whose curling crests break into claw-like foam. Mount Fuji sits small and composed in the middle distance, dwarfed by the churning sea.

The image works partly through contrast — the chaos of water against the stillness of the mountain — and partly through the technical precision of the print itself. Hokusai used Prussian blue, a pigment recently imported from Europe, to achieve the deep, cold tonality that distinguishes the wave from earlier, softer ukiyo-e seascapes. The composition was radical: the horizon is low, the wave towers overhead, and the viewer is placed among the boatmen, inside the danger.

The Thirty-Six Views and Beyond

The "Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji" series eventually comprised forty-six prints. Hokusai returned to Fuji from above clouds, from lakeshores, from beneath a waterfall, from a cargo boat loaded with barrels. Each print is a different exercise in composition and colour, yet together they form a coherent meditation on the sacred and the everyday, on how a single unchanging landmark looks different from every perspective.

Among the other celebrated prints in the series, "Fine Wind, Clear Morning" — also called "Red Fuji" — shows the mountain at sunrise, its flanks shading from rust to blue-green, clouds streaming away from the summit. It is quieter than the Great Wave but equally assured: a landscape reduced to essential masses of colour.

Books, Drawings, and Unending Curiosity

Hokusai also produced the "Manga" — fifteen volumes of sketching exercises published from 1814 onward, covering every subject from animals and fish to wrestling holds, architectural details, and comic figures. These were not manga in the modern sense but encyclopaedic drawing manuals used by students across Japan. They show the range of his observation and his delight in the physical world.

Mojud holds a selection of Hokusai's prints spanning his long career, from early actor prints to the landscape series of his late decades. Browsing the collection on Mojud, you can examine the fine registration of the woodblocks and the subtle gradation of colour achieved by skilled printers working from his designs. Fine-art print reproductions of his most iconic images are available for those who want to live with this work.

The Last Wish

In a postscript written near the end of his life, Hokusai said that if heaven granted him ten more years — or even five — he might at last become a real painter. He had spent seventy years in relentless practice and considered himself still learning. That combination of mastery and dissatisfaction is what kept his work alive across nine decades and what makes it still surprising today.