Katsushika Hokusai

In the last years of his life Hokusai used the name Gakyō Rōjin Manji — “the old man mad about art” — an apt epithet for an artist who made no fewer than 30,000 pictures over his long career. His career began at the age of 14, when he became an assistant in the studio of the renowned woodblock artist Shunshō (one of his works pictured). His innovative style first attracted attention in the early 1800s, when he won a painting competition announced by a local shogun. Having painted a blue curve on a large sheet of drawing paper, he chased a chicken with red-painted feet across it, and presented the resulting picture as a river with red maple leaves floating on it. Hokusai’s favourite subject, however, was Mount Fuji. His interest stemmed from religious conviction — in Buddhism the mountain symbolises eternal life. A few years after the Thirty-Six Views Hokusai made another series of 100 prints of the mountain, which occupied his imagination all his life.

From the page of The Great Wave off Kanagawa