ArtistJapanese
Katsushika Hokusai
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Hokusai was born around 31 October 1760 in the Katsushika district of Edo, the city that would eventually be renamed Tokyo. He began painting as a child of six, possibly learning from his father, a craftsman who painted decorative lacquerwork. At nineteen he entered the studio of Katsukawa Shunsho, a leading figure in the Floating World tradition of ukiyo-e, and spent his formative years producing actor prints and portraits of beautiful women under the name Shunro. But the confines of the Katsukawa school would not hold him for long. Expelled in the 1790s, he set about reinventing himself - the first of many such reinventions over a career that would span more than seventy years and accumulate at least thirty working names.
The name Hokusai, which he adopted in 1798, translates roughly as 'north star studio.' By then he had already absorbed Dutch copper engravings, Chinese painting manuals, and Western perspective conventions, synthesising them into a visual vocabulary unlike anything his predecessors had made. His ambition was not stylistic novelty for its own sake but comprehensiveness: he wanted to draw everything. The Hokusai Manga, a series of fifteen volumes of sketches published from 1814 onward, catalogued birds, fish, wrestlers, ghosts, landscapes, architectural details, and human figures in motion - an encyclopaedia of the visible world executed with a loose, searching line that influenced generations of artists long after his death.
The series that secured his place in art history, Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, was produced between roughly 1830 and 1832, when Hokusai was already in his early seventies. It introduced Prussian blue - a synthetic pigment newly available from Dutch traders - into the Japanese printmaking palette, giving the series a tonal range and a clarity that no earlier landscape printing had achieved. 'The Great Wave off Kanagawa,' the first print in the series, shows a towering curling wave dwarfing three fishing boats, with Fuji reduced to a small white triangle in the distance. The compositional drama, the tension between the local moment of crisis and the permanent mountain, the precise observation of how water actually moves - all of it reads as entirely modern. It is one of the most reproduced images in human history.
His influence on Western art followed a specific channel. Japanese woodblock prints began reaching Europe in significant numbers after Japan reopened its ports in 1854, just five years after Hokusai's death. The Impressionists encountered them with shock and delight. Claude Monet collected over 200 Japanese prints and hung many in his home at Giverny; Vincent van Gogh copied them directly in paint. The flattened planes, the bold outlines, the emphasis on pattern over volume, the willingness to crop and fragment - all of these entered European painting through Japonisme, and Hokusai was among its primary sources. Claude Debussy kept a copy of 'The Great Wave' in his studio while composing 'La Mer' and requested it for the cover of the 1905 score.
Hokusai himself called his late self 'Gakyo Rojin Manji' - the Old Man Crazy to Paint. He moved residence ninety-three times over his life, produced an estimated 30,000 designs, and died in 1849 at the age of eighty-eight or eighty-nine, reportedly saying: 'If only Heaven will give me just another ten years... just five more years, then I could become a real painter.' The remark is either an old man's characteristic self-deprecation or a genuine statement of method - the belief that looking and making never reach completion.
On the Nordic auction market Hokusai appears modestly but consistently, with 11 lots recorded on the platform. Bukowskis Stockholm accounts for three of these, alongside Auktionshuset Kolonn and Gomér and Andersson Norrköping. The works are predominantly prints - woodblock sheets from series such as 'Denshin Gafu' and reproductions after 'Yoshida on the Tokaido' - catalogued under Art, Asian Art, and Prints and Engravings. The top recorded sale is 1,800 EUR for 'Two Wild Geese Flying in Front of the Full Moon,' with most lots trading at considerably more modest levels, reflecting the market reality that original Hokusai prints of high condition remain rare at Nordic sales while attributed and later impression works circulate more freely.