Katsushika Hokusai

This Art Book with Foreword and annotated reproductions by Maria Tsaneva contains 210 selected drawings and prints of Katsushika Hokusai.

Katsushika Hokusai was a brilliant artist, ukiyo-e painter and print maker, best known for his wood block print series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, which contain the prints The Great Wave and Fuji in Clear Weather. These prints are famous both in Japan and overseas, and have left a lasting image in the worldwide art world. Hokusai’s artistic influence has stretched to have affected the Art Nouveau style in Europe, including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Hermann Obrist, all of whom have themes similar to Hokusai’s.

Hokusai had a long career, but he produced most of his important work after age 60. The aged artist lost everything in a fire at his lodgings in 1839 and devoted the last ten years of his life to painting increasingly transcendent subjects, such as tigers and mythic creatures.