Encyclopedia of Artists

A life of constant reinvention

Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) worked in Edo across a career of roughly seven decades. He changed names, homes, subjects, and formats repeatedly, treating artistic practice as an open-ended search rather than a settled identity.

Hokusai designed actor prints, illustrated books, manuals, surimono, landscapes, and paintings. His close study of gesture, weather, water, plants, and labor joined disciplined drawing to a remarkable freedom of invention.

Mount Fuji and a global image

The series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji brought landscape to the foreground of popular print culture. In The Great Wave off Kanagawa, the curve of the wave echoes the distant mountain while boats and foam turn scale into a drama of human vulnerability.

Fine Wind, Clear Weather, often called Red Fuji, achieves a very different effect through broad color and spare geometry. Hokusai’s prints circulated widely in Europe during the nineteenth century, influencing artists and designers, yet their lasting force begins with the visual intelligence of Edo-period printmaking.