Katsushika Hokusai
c. 1760 – 10 May 1849
Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) was a Japanese ukiyo-e painter and printmaker of the Edo period, best known for the woodblock print series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, which includes the iconic Great Wave off Kanagawa. Prolific across more than seven decades and dozens of art names, his work profoundly influenced European Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists.
Lived at the same time
Well-documented people whose lives overlapped with Katsushika Hokusai.
- Caroline Herschel (1750–1848) Overlapped 88 years →
- Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842) Overlapped 82 years →
- Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) Overlapped 80 years →
- Muhammad Ali Pasha (1769–1849) Overlapped 80 years →
- John Dalton (1766–1844) Overlapped 78 years →
- J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851) Overlapped 74 years →
Life events
Hokusai was born in the Katsushika district of Edo, traditionally on the 23rd day of the 9th month of 1760, though his exact birth date is uncertain.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgAs a teenager Hokusai was apprenticed to a woodcarver, learning the block-cutting craft that underpinned ukiyo-e printmaking.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgAt eighteen Hokusai joined the studio of the ukiyo-e master Katsukawa Shunshō, publishing his first prints of kabuki actors the following year under the name Shunrō.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgAfter Shunshō's death Hokusai was expelled from the Katsukawa school, and he broadened his art beyond actor prints to landscapes and scenes of daily life.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgAround the turn of the century the artist began using the name Hokusai, one of more than thirty art names he adopted over his career, and took on his own students.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgHokusai issued the first volume of his Manga, an encyclopedic collection of thousands of sketches that became hugely popular and eventually ran to fifteen volumes.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgIn his early seventies Hokusai produced his landmark landscape series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, whose Great Wave off Kanagawa became one of the most recognizable images in world art.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgHokusai followed his success with the illustrated book series One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, often considered the masterpiece of his landscape books.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgHokusai died in Edo at the age of 88, reportedly lamenting that with a few more years he could have become a true painter, and was buried at Seikyō-ji temple in Tokyo.
Source: en.wikipedia.org