After quite some time, Japan reopened again for small groups of foreigners, and I was one of them. I also believe that it cannot have been a coincidence that I was not only welcomed by my in-laws but also by Hokusai himself. Indeed, I had an opportunity to see and enjoy two exhibitions devoted to…
Or is it The Hague? From the rather typical buildings in Hokusai’s scheme of Western perspective that he includes in his Hokusai manga volume 3 of 1815, it is quite obvious that his original inspiration was some European optical print. From the 1730s, the Dutch introduced such prints, produced in London (most by Robert Sayer,…
We like mysteries, don’t we? Today we go for this fabulous Hokusai self-portrait as a drawing at the end of a letter to ... some unidentified publisher. It is signed Hachiemon 八右衛門 with the seal Manji 卍, adding his age as 83 years old 八十三歳, so we know this must date from 1842. Even when…
Nobody will ever forget these lines once you have read them. That artist who was confident that he would ‘at ninety have got even closer to the essence of art, and at the age of one hundred I will reach a magnificent level, and at a hundred and ten, each dot and each line will…
Summarizing the conclusions reached in the four preceding parts, we can give a date of 1830 or Tenpō 1 (天保元年) to the so far identified subjects of Nihonbashi (日本橋), Ōji (王子), Sumidagawa (隅田川), Fukagawa (深川), Shibaura (芝浦), Ōhashi (大橋), Mimeguri (三園), Ueno no hana (上野花), and Yanaka (谷中), all picture envelopes, efūto (繪封筒), measuring 191 x 51…
In the foregoing parts we have been investigating four series or groups of prints, two of them comprised of aizurie prints exclusively and two other groups with only a part printed as aizurie. In these four groups, we found three different phrasings of Hokusai’s signature, as follows: Hokusai aratame Iitsu (Hokusai changing his name to…
As far as I know, there are only three more examples of aizuri prints by Hokusai that need to be considered, and then we can try and see whether we can reach a conclusion on our original question: What is the date of the so-called Great Wave? This time we will focus on a group…
In the early 1840s, Kuniyoshi took up the theme of landscape prints again, after some more than five years silence on this front. Alas, for reasons unknown, the project was stopped after only five designs had come out. Was it the poor reaction of the print buying public, or was it beyond the capacity of…
As for prints in various tones of blue exclusively, so-called aizurie, a series of probably ten prints issued by the publisher Moriya Jihei is probably the best example. It was issued without any series or print titles, and was comprised of figures, landscapes, and subjects from nature. They are small format koban prints, roughly measuring…
Quite surprisingly, we can still find various datings for one of the world’s most iconic images, the Great Wave as it is popularly called, actually titled In the Hollow of the Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki namiura), one of the prints in Hokusai’s series of Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei). Hokusai, Kanagawa oki namiura…