Katsushika Hokusai

“ From the standpoint of Buddhism, Hokusai was the crowning glory, the supreme efflorescence of countless previous incarnations. In his career he epitomized the theory of evolution, the embryonic stages being exemplified by his progress through the schools. Trained in the atelier of Shunsho, the most skillful exponent of Ukiyo-ye art, he rapidly absorbed the methods of his master; but even the Popular School was trammelled by convention, and Hokusai’s genius, rejecting academic fetters, winged its flight through all the realms of oriental art. ”

“ After that, he was so poor that he peddled in the streets of Tokyo.
Later, Hokusai collaborated with the successful novelist Bakin for many years. The famous set of prints of a hundred views of Fuji, the series of the waterfalls of Japan, the noted bridges, the scenes in the Loochoo Islands, as well as the views of the Tokaido, were all done in the latter part of his life. Hokusai used strong colours, and produced fine work. He was most unfortunate in having all his original studies destroyed by fire, and as he was careless about money matters he died in poverty. ”

“ In the inimitable sketch-book of Hokusai, the bourgeois artist who threw all classical rules to the winds, we see the sort of people who really "had a good time," while their betters bored themselves to extinction, namely, the Japanese shopkeepers and artisans. We see their homely jokes, their drunken sprees, their occasional sly hits at superiors, as when, for example, a group of street Arabs is depicted making fun of some Confucian sage behind his back, or as when the stately Daimyō's procession becomes a procession of grass hoppers bearing a mantis in a basket. ”

“ Hokusai’s own figures walking about in straw rain-coats and straw sandals—bare-limbed peasants; and patient-faced mothers, with smiling bald babies on their backs, toddling by upon their geta.... And suddenly a singular sensation comes upon me as I stand before a weirdly sculptured portal,—a sensation of dream and doubt. It seems to me that the steps, and the dragon-swarming gate, and the blue sky arching over the roofs of the town, and the ghostly beauty of Fuji, and the shadow of myself there stretching upon the grey masonry, must all vanish presently ... ”

“ The right moment had now come for Shunsho with his numerous school, for Kiyonaga and for Utamaro, who in the closing third of the eighteenth century brought Japanese wood-engraving to its full development. Hokusai, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was the last of the great artists of this line. Out of the multitude of the artists who follow, still for the most part admirably trained but lacking in dignity and precision, Hiroshige, with his subtly subjective landscapes, alone stands out conspicuously. ”

“ A mere trick!—unworthy of genius, we might say, but Hokusai had gauged his countrymen, and knew that his jeu d’esprit would arouse and impress these aristocratic connoisseurs, jaded with ceremonial observances, more than any display of technical knowledge,—for the Japanese, as a nation, are naively childish in their love of novelty and amusement, and of the unusual and bizarre. ”

“ Kyōsai must be considered the greatest successor of Hokusai (of whom, however, he was not a pupil) , and as the first political caricaturist of Japan. His work—like his life—is somewhat wild and undisciplined, and “occasionally smacks of the sakē cup.” But if he did not possess Hokusai’s dignity, power and reticence, he substituted an exuberant fancy, which always lends interest to draughtsmanship of very great technical excellence. In addition to his caricatures, Kyōsai painted a large number of pictures and sketches, often choosing subjects from the folk-lore of his country. ”

“ After a thorough training in youth, Hokusai had risen, about the year 1800, to the first rank of artists; by his subsequent activity, which always exhibited great ability and imagination, and an effort to expand the sphere of representation, he retarded the inevitable decline of Japanese art for decades, but as he was lacking in culture and sterling personality, and remained fast-bound among externals, he was neither able to lead art back to its former height nor to create a new and great style. ”

“ I invite those who are going to live as long as I to convince themselves whether I shall keep my word. Written at the age of seventy-five years by me, formerly Hokusai, now called the Old Man Mad with Painting." His dying words were: "If the gods had given me only ten years more—only five years more—I could have become a really great painter!"
Hokusai's education began as an apprentice to a wood-engraver, a valuable experience for his later career. At the age of eighteen he entered the studio of Shunsho and adopted the name of Shunro. ”

“ It is the fact that 1 was in Tokyo, taking a street car towards my college at Mita. The car was crowded with people who, as it was already in the hot summer, had decided—all of them—without any discussion, to act barbarously and wear the thinnest kimono just for an excuse; many of them even exposed their naked legs. But their barbarism did not wound my mind, which had seen enough of Wester customs; and it appeared quite striking and romantic, like Hokusai’s pictures. I might be myself a bit of a savage in my heart, the lover of tropical unmorality; to be unmoral is at least comfortable. ”

“ We, for our part, have no desire to join in either panegyric or condemnation. Looked at from the European point of view, Hokusai certainly displays a richness of invention, a keenness of observation, and a sureness of touch which we could find but little to match; and even from the Japanese point of view, we must admit that during the first decades of his activity, from about 1790 to 1805, he stands worthily beside Yeishi, Utamaro, and Toyokuni, producing graceful work of an individual stamp ”

“ European collectors—such men as Gonse, for instance—have been looked down on by certain enthusiasts in Japan for the preference which they evince for Hokusai and the modern Popular School (Ukiyo-e Ryū) generally. It is very bold of us to venture to express an opinion on such a matter; but we think that the instinct which led Gonse and others to Hokusai led them aright,—that Japanese art was itself led to Hokusai by a legitimate and most fortunate process of development, that it was led out of the close atmosphere of academical conventionality into the fresh air of heaven. ”

“ In the year 1797 he illustrated books together with Yeishi, Shigemasa, and others; in 1798 he brought out with them and Utamaro a work: Dantoka (?) "Dancing Songs for Men." In the same year is dated the foreword to the work Onna niobo sanjiurokkasen, the Thirty-six Poetesses, printed in 1801, for which Hokusai designed the title and Yeishi the other sheets. Here he already uses the name Hokusai, which he is supposed to have taken as a token of his great reverence for the god Hokushin Mioken, and which first occurs in 1790 in the Mitate shushingura ”

“ Here for the first time in our survey of the prints do we find elemental fury depicted with grandiose eloquence. In the majestic composition of the "Great Tree" (Plate 50) the calm sublimity of nature and the infinitely minute, vermin-like aspect of man is superbly expressed. In the "Tama River" (Plate 49) Hokusai gives us a sweep of wave and shore, mist and mountain, that his great predecessors, the landscape-painters of Sung days in China, might have envied. In all these prints he relates man and nature to each other with a vividness and dramatic power foreign to his great rival Hiroshige. ”

“ For the “vale of tears” is not a Christian concept only: Mrs. Gummidge was also a Buddhist without knowing it. It is curious that this theological term, with its disparaging connotation, was affixed to the modern popular school of painters, among whom Hokusai is the best known, because they descended from lofty, conventional subjects to the life of workaday folk. The central thought of the poem, however, narrowed to a romantic application, recalls a line by Browning:
“Never the time and place, and the loved one altogether.” ”

“ Although it may sound paradoxical, I am pleased to say that his failure was his success, because I see his undaunted versatility glorified through his failure; he helps, more than any other artist, the historian of Japanese art to study the age psychologically—in fact, he serves him more than Hokusai or Utamaro. He is an interesting study, as I said before, as the last master, indeed, as much so as Moronobu Hishikawa as the recognised first master. I say Yoshitoshi failed, but I do not mean that he was a so-called failure in his lifetime ”

“ With that strong poetic feeling so characteristic of the Japanese, Eternity meant for Hokusai an infinite time in which to carry on his beloved work—to perfect, to make alive all the wonderful strokes of his brush. As in ancient Egypt, so in Old Japan, the future life could only mean real happiness with periodic visits to this world again, and there is a subtle and almost pathetic paradox in this conception, suggesting, as it were, the continual loading of Eternity with fresh earthly memories. ”

“ Hiroshige, the versatile painter, lover of landscape and ethereal artist of snow and mist; Hokusai, the prophet, and regenerator of Ukiyo-ye. He was the artisan-artist, in the land which recognizes no inferior arts, and the Mang-wa, consisting of studies as spontaneously thrown off as those in the sketch-book Giorgione carried in his girdle, was published for the use of workmen. Living in simplicity and poverty he gave his life to the people, and the impression of his genius is stamped upon their work. ”

“ They certainly have strength and individuality, but they are hideous beyond words. He was especially fond of doing actors, and the faces are full of expression.
[pg 364] Hokusai, whom Whistler called "the greatest pictorial artist since Vandyke," is placed by European critics at the head of all colour-print designers, but in Japan is considered second-rate. For one reason, the Japanese cannot forgive the vulgarity of some of his subjects. ”

“ Chefs d'œuvre d'Art japonais. Paris, 1905. Illustrated. Migeon, Gaston. Au Japon. Paris, 1908. English translation. London, 1908, 16mo, illustrated. Morse, Edward S. Notes on Hokusai. In the American Art Review, vol. i. ”

“ And it is my prayer to the Eight Million Deities that are told to guard over the shores of Japan, that the present work may speed on its way overseas, and, though seen through a filmy screen brought on its face of beauty in the process of recasting in a strange language, may meet with such reception as it merits in those countries where the people have shown themselves so ready with their sympathy in the cases of Hiroshige and Hokusai, of whom Tanizaki, different as the mode may be, chosen for the expression of his artistic soul, is certainly a disciple of no mean distinction. ”

“ The Japanese are ever imitative, and Hokusai may have borne in mind the legend of his prototype Sesshiu, an artist-priest of the fifteenth century, who sketched before the Emperor of China a marvellous dragon, with splashes from a broom plunged in ink. ”

“ Although I can enjoy and even criticise Hiroshige or Hokusai at any time and in any place, let me tell you that I cannot do so with Utamaro, because I must be first in the rightest mood (who says bodies have no mood?) as when I see the living woman; to properly appreciate his work of art I must have the fullness of my physical strength so that my criticism is disarmed. (Criticism ? Why, that is the art for people imperfect in health, thin and tired.) ”

“ In both countries we find the spirit hankering after old human haunts. In Egypt the soul returned through the medium of its preserved body, and in Japan the Festival of the Dead, described elsewhere, afforded a joyous exit from the world of Emma-Ō, a three days' visit in the middle of July to Japan, a land more beautiful, more dear, it would seem, than any Japanese conception of a future world. But Hokusai appears to suggest that his visits would not be made merely in the [Pg 118] summer season—rather a frequent coming and going at all times of the year. ”

“ Hokusai's main concern was with the fundamental architecture of landscape; he outlined the structure of mountains, rocks, rivers, waves, and bridges with a hard and brilliant sharpness; but Hiroshige, less rigid in his treatment, seems chiefly intent upon the more delicate and transitory appearances of cloud and mist, rain and snow, sunrise and dusk, that give to a landscape at each moment so much of{380} its specific character. These atmospheric effects of his are justly famous. Few landscape painters of any race have succeeded in rendering so finely the mood of a scene. ”

“ Among the single sheets there are series of courtesans in outdoor costume; in one of these series, saké-cups are used as a distinguishing mark; in another, rabbits. A series distinguished by flowers depicts young women as representatives of art.
In the book Onna sanjiurokkasen, of 1798, for which Hokusai drew the title-page, Yeishi depicted thirty-six young poetesses of Yedo.
His principal pupil was Yeisho, who was active until the end of the eighteenth century, and who developed a graceful and distinctively decorative talent. [2] His artistic name was Chokusai. ”

“ And it is the old Japanese way to speak of wine-drinking and general revel with innocent gusto, as I find in Kyosai Gwaden, an illustrated autobiography here and there humorously exaggerated but none the less sincere, from which all the writers on Kyosai, Professor Conder included, draw the materials of his life; he is often in danger of being criticised for his self-advertising audacity, this artist of fine madness. He often reminds me of Hokusai, not so much in his artistic expression as in temperament. ”