On his deathbed, Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai had one regret: ‘If heaven had granted me five more years of life, I could have become a true painter.’ The story may be apocryphal, but it’s perfectly plausible — Hokusai’s entire life reads like a legend.
Born in October 1760 in Honjo, Edo, he was only three when he was adopted into a family that made mirrors for the shogun. After a spell as a block-cutter’s apprentice, he joined the studio of ukiyo-e painter and printmaker Katsukawa Shunshō — ukiyo-e being the ‘floating world’ of theatre and pleasure houses.
The not-quite-yet Hokusai — he went under a different name at the time — began making actor prints, but was expelled, or left, soon after his master’s death. He found a new niche illustrating kyōka, witty poetry books, and in 1798 passed his name on to a pupil, a customary practice at the time, becoming instead Hokusai Tokimasa. The name wouldn’t last: the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco recorded at least 20 different monikers for him — and 90 house moves.
The dawn of the 19th century brought Hokusai fame and fortune. He gave painting performances at temples and in front of the shogun, creating pictures of such a scale — his 1817 depiction of Buddhist patriarch Daruma covered more than 2,000 square feet — that would dwarf many of Western art’s monumental works. Five years earlier, in 1812, the freshly renamed Katsushika Hokusai had also published his own drawing manual, Quick Lessons in Simplified Drawing.
Then, disaster struck. In the 1820s, soon after turning 60, he lost both a daughter and his second wife, contended with a grandson’s gambling debts and may have even had a stroke. His work suffered and, in 1830, affairs were so dire the artist lamented to his publishers that he had ‘no money, no clothes to wear, nothing to eat,’ as Matthi Forrer wrote in Simiolus in 2018.”
A lesser man would have probably given up — but not Hokusai. His daughter Ōi joined him and, together, they set out to revive his fortunes. The artist sailed through his seventies, producing some of his most celebrated work, including Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, soon to be the subject of an exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London.
Japan’s highest peak and one of its three holy mountains (forbidden to women until 1872), Mount Fuji had long been a favourite artistic motif, with one of the earliest depictions, Hata no Chitei’s Shōtoku Taishi E-Den, dating from 1069. Hokusai portrayed it from different angles and seasons. In Red Fuji, the mountain, bathed in a fiery glow under a vivid blue sky speckled with fluffy clouds, towers above the trees, almost filling the entire picture, which is devoid of people. In Thunderstorm Beneath the Summit, the peak soars above rain and lightning.
Yet, many of the 36 views also show a slice of early-19th-century Japan, not least the celebrated Mitsui kimono shop, which owed part of its fortune to a groundbreaking policy: it accepted ‘cash only’, doing away with deferred payments, but promised ‘no padded prices’. Both signs appear in Hokusai’s picture, where triangular roofs echo the shape of Mount Fuji.
The revered mountain is also little more than a backdrop in the most famous of the 36 views, Under the Wave off Kanagawa, more familiarly known as The Great Wave. The swell hovers like a menacing talon above fragile oshiokuri-bune, the boats that supplied Edo, modern-day Tokyo, with fresh fish. Thought to be the most widely reproduced piece of non-Western art, The Great Wave was already hugely sought-after in Hokusai’s times, when about 8,000 impressions were made, according to the British Museum.
Perhaps the most intriguing of the 36 views, however, is much less known: Reflection in Lake at Misaka in Kai Province. In this scene, Hokusai shows the reflection of Mount Fuji in the water, its peak clothed in snow — but the mountain above the lake has not a single flake.
In the USA, the Metropolitan Museum in New York suggests this may represent two seasons, but Yale University Art Gallery interprets it as an invitation to question what is real and what isn’t.
Although the Fuji theme was traditional, the 36 views were anything but: this was Japan’s first landscape print series to appear in a large format and among the first to use Prussian blue, a fade-resistant pigment imported from the Netherlands and China. Nor were they 36 — with sales booming, the publisher added another 10, but kept the original title. The prints’ popularity was fuelled by their affordability: in the mid 19th century, one cost about as much as two helpings of noodles, according to the British Museum.
By 1836, Hokusai was secure enough to dictate conditions to his publisher: ‘He requests that Egawa Tomekichi, whom he regarded as the best blockcutter working in Edo at that time, be engaged to cut the blocks,’ noted Ellis Tinios in Print Quarterly in 2015. ‘He explains that Egawa had cut the blocks for Fugaku Hyakkei [One hundred views of Mount Fuji] and, after closely checking every page of that book, he declared that he could not find any fault in Egawa’s realisation of his intentions.’ Nor did he mince words when unhappy: he once complained to a blockcutter about the cutting of eyes and noses, adding sketches for good measure: ‘Recently, these eyes and noses have been very popular. But I really, really hate them!’”
A self-proclaimed ‘old man mad about painting’, Hokusai was an early proponent of lifelong learning. In the afterword to the One hundred views of Mount Fuji, written when he was about 74, he noted: ‘Since the age of six, I had a habit of sketching from life. From 50 onwards, I began producing a fair amount of art work, but nothing I did before the age of 70 was worthy of attention. At 73, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If only I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am 80, so that by 90 I will have penetrated their essential nature. At 100, I hope I may have a divine understanding of them, while at 110 I may have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive.’
He didn’t quite live to 110, but after his death he continued to make waves, as it were — this time into the wider world, as Japanese prints became popular in Europe from the late 19th century. Comparing him to Eugène Delacroix, Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother, Theo: ‘Hokusai makes you cry out the same thing — but in his case with his lines, his drawing, since in your letter you say to yourself: these waves are claws, the boat is caught in them, you can feel it.’
Claude Debussy hung a print of The Great Wave in his Paris studio and chose a detail of the design as the 1905 cover of the score of his orchestral triptych La Mer. Another devotee was Frank Lloyd Wright, who bought many prints, including Nihonbashi in Edo —with its crowded bridge in the foreground — and Snowy Morning at Koishikawa, where the cold is palpable as a white blanket envelops trees, roofs, fields and the slopes of an exceedingly tall Mount Fuji, to which a woman points from a window.
Indeed, it was the West and most notably a France gripped by Japonisme, that made Hokusai’s reputation as Japan’s greatest artist, according to cultural-exchange scholar Shigemi Inaga: as he noted in Japan Review in 2003, 19th-century French art critics such as Philippe Burty compared the ukiyo-e artist to Francisco Goya or Peter Paul Rubens— w hereas the Histoire de l’Art du Japon, published by the Imperial Japanese Commission for the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, only devoted to Hokusai 12 lines and a single plate.
Praise from abroad has long since filtered back home and The Great Wave is now in the pockets of most Japanese every day — it is printed on the back of 1,000-yen banknotes. The old man mad about painting would probably be delighted.
This feature originally appeared in the October 14, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.'