Article "Hokusai"

Hokusai was born in 1760, in Katsushika,a district in the east of Edo (now Tokyo). His birth name was Tokitarō,[12] and he was the son of a mirror maker to the shōgun. As he was never recognised for the purposes of inheritance, it is probable that his mother was a concubine.[13] He started painting at six and at twelve his father sent him to work at a booksellers. At sixteen, he was apprenticed as an engraver and spent three years learning the trade. At the same time he began to produce his own illustrations. At eighteen he was accepted as an apprentice to the artist Katsukawa Shunshō, one of the foremost ukiyo-e artists of the time. After a year, his master gave him the name Shunrō, the name he used to sign his first works in 1779.[14] Shunshō died in 1793, so by himself Hokusai began to study distinct Japanese and Chinese styles and some Dutch and French painting. During this period he mainly concentrated on producing surimono, or New Year's cards, and advertisements, scenes of daily life and landscapes.[15] In 1800 he published Famous Views of the Eastern Capital and Eight views of Edo, and also began to accept students. It was during this period that he began to use the name Hokusai;[15] he used more than 30 different pseudonyms during his life.[13] In 1804 he became famous as an artist when, during a festival in Tokyo, he completed a 240m² painting[12] of a Buddhist monk named Daruma. Soon afterwards he appeared before the shōgun Tokugawa Ienari when he won a talent competition against an artist working the traditional Chinese style. Three years later he began work illustrating three books of the novelist Takizawa Bakin, with whom he argued. In 1812, the precarious economic situation forced him to publish a manual, Quick Lessons in Simplified Drawing and to travel to Nagoya and Kyoto to try to sign up students. In 1814, he published the first of fifteen volumes of sketches entitled Manga. These included things that interested him such as people, animals and the Buddha. In the late 1820s, he published Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, which proved so popular that he later added a further ten prints.[16] Later works included Unusual Views of Celebrated Bridges in the Provinces, A Tour of the Waterfalls of the Provinces and One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji.[17] In 1839, just as his work started to be eclipsed by that of Andō Hiroshige, his studio burned down and most of his work was destroyed. He died at the age of 89,[15] in 1849.[18] Some years before his death he is reported to have stated: At the age of five years I had the habit of sketching things. At the age of fifty I had produced a large number of pictures, but for all that, none of them had any merit until the age of seventy. At seventy-three finally I learned something about the true nature of things, birds, animals, insects, fish, the grasses and the trees. So at the age of eighty years I will have made some progress, at ninety I will have penetrated the deepest significance of things, at a hundred I will make real wonders and at a hundred and ten, every point, every line, will have a life of its own.[19]