FISHING VILLAGE by Hokusai (Japan 1760-1849) Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Hokusai, full name Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), Japanese painter and wood engraver, born in Edo (now Tokyo). He is considered one of the outstanding figures of the Ukiyo-e, or "pictures of the floating world" (everyday life), school of printmaking.
Hokusai entered the studio of his countryman Katsukawa Shunsho in 1775 and there learned the new, popular technique of woodcut printmaking. Between 1796 and 1802 he produced a vast number of book illustrations and color prints, perhaps as many as 30,000, that drew their inspiration from the traditions, legends, and lives of the Japanese people. Hokusai's most typical wood-block prints, silkscreens, and landscape paintings were done between 1830 and 1840. The free curved lines characteristic of his style gradually developed into a series of spirals that imparted the utmost freedom and grace to his work, as in Raiden, the Spirit of Thunder.
In his late works Hokusai used large, broken strokes and a method of coloring that imparted a more somber mood to his work, as in his massive Group of Workmen Building a Boat. Even after reaching the age of eighty, he was busy producing many fine prints. He often expressed his desire to live beyond the age of ninety, and just before he died on April 18, 1849 at the age of 89, he sighed and said his last words: "If heaven gives me ten more years,", paused, then continued, "or an extension of even five years, I shall surely become a true artist."

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