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Title: Hokusai
Author: Salaman, Malcolm Charles (1855-1940)
Illustrator: Hokusai [Katsushika Hokusai] (1760-1849)
Date of first publication: 1930
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: The Studio Ltd.;
   New York: William Edwin Rudge, 1930
   [Masters of the Colour Print 8]
   (first edition)
Date first posted: 24 July 2009
Date last updated: 24 July 2009
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #358

This ebook was produced by:
Marcia Brooks, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at http://www.pgdp.net




MASTERS OF THE COLOUR PRINT

8

Hokusai


LONDON: THE STUDIO LTD., 44 LEICESTER SQUARE
NEW YORK: WILLIAM EDWIN RUDGE, 475 FIFTH AVENUE

1930


MASTERS OF THE COLOUR PRINT

1. ELYSE LORD

2. J. R. SMITH

3. E. A. VERPILLEUX

4. W. GILES

5. P. L. DEBUCOURT

6. HIROSHIGE

7. BRESSLERN-ROTH

8. HOKUSAI

_Others in Preparation_


_Printed and Engraved in
England by Herbert Reiach,
Limited, 43 Belvedere Road,
London, S.E.1._


Of all the artists who designed the _Ukeyoye_, or popular prints, of
Japan there was none like Hokusai, none with his natural independence of
all artistic traditions and conventions, none who revelled so happily
and freely in depicting every phase and aspect of the people's life he
saw with his own eyes, or imagined with his own mind, none who was so
pictorially versatile and original in conception, so wonderfully facile
with a magic of draughtsmanship. "From the age of six I began to draw,"
wrote the master in his virile old age, "and for eighty-four years I
have worked independently of the schools," and he playfully described
himself as "the old man mad about drawing." Connoisseurs of his own
country, accustomed only to admire and reverence art that followed the
sacred traditions and ideals of the classical schools, would despise
Hokusai as a vulgar artisan playing to the populace, while tolerating
with respect the stately pictorial graces of such _Ukeyoye_ masters as
Harunobu, Kiyonaga and Utamaro, yet modern opinion in Europe and America
has discovered Hokusai to be one of the great artists of the world, and
Whistler himself paid him homage along with Rembrandt and Velasquez. For
Hokusai lived till his ninetieth year, and all the time his art was
changing, developing, progressing, so that, as the years passed, his
popular prints were impressed with masterpieces that only he could have
designed. That is why so many more Western than Eastern writers have
concerned themselves with Hokusai and great collections of his prints
have been formed in Europe and America. One finds studies of him among
the writings of the brothers de Goncourt, Bing, Anderson, Fenollosa,
Strange, Laurence Binyon, Charles Holmes, Arthur Morrison, Duret, Gonse,
Revon, Arthur D. Ficke, and the naively enthusiastic Japanese, Niguchi.
Even those who are inclined to hesitate between Japanese and Western
opinion find it difficult to deny to Hokusai's maturity the status of a
master of imaginative design, revealing, in the conception of a scene,
the very soul and wonder of it, such as one might see, perhaps, in a
beautiful dream. His splendid maturity dates from 1812, when his
epoch-making _Mangwa_ began to appear, and it was signalised, between
1823 and 1830, by the _Thirty-Six Views of Fuji_, the _Waterfalls_, the
_Bridges_, _Living Images of the Poets_, _Hundred Poems explained by the
Nurse_, in original chromatic harmonies, and, a little later, _The
Hundred Views of Fuji_, in monochrome.

Hokusai was an amazing personality, generally in the straits of poverty,
yet always cheerfully, laughingly humorous, happy in the strivings of
his art, working ceaselessly till his dying day, when he cried for
further life. "If Heaven would give me but ten more years, nay, even
five, I might still become a true artist." He was one of the most
genuine and generous creatures that ever lived. However his
plain-speaking might rebound against himself, money meant nothing to him
except the means to subsist and buy material for his art. A peasant
born, a peasant he remained all his long life, never pretending to be
anything else, but he had in his soul the very genius of happiness, and
could laugh away troubles with the joy of his art. So, wherever he might
be--and he is said to have changed his dwelling-place over ninety times,
sometimes to a hovel with bare necessities--beyond the pot-boilers he
might have to draw under the pressure of circumstances, his artistic
ideals shone always for the aspiring industry of his genius. Hokusai was
born in the Honjo district of Yedo, as Tokyo used to be called, in the
year 1760, while Hogarth, Reynolds and Gainsborough, Chardin and
Fragonard, and Goya were still painting, and he died in 1849, the year
that Rossetti, Millais and Holman Hunt founded the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood under the inspiration of my revered old friend Ford Madox
Brown. And, between these dates, the little art of the colour-print in
England and France, which had not yet begun to effloresce, reached the
acme of its brief fashionable favour, while in Japan, the polychrome
woodcut which was just about to develop from its simpler form, in the
creative hands of Harunobu, into the beautiful distinctive art it
attained, was only temporarily arrested from decadence by the original
genius of the two masters, Hiroshige and Hokusai.

What Hokusai's real patronymic was it is difficult to say. He chose to
be known in the course of his life by a wilderness of appellations.
According to the accident of circumstances he could change from one name
to another. For the last fifty years of his life he called himself, with
occasional variations, Katsushika Hokusai, adopting the first name from
the quarter of Yedo in which he lived, and the second from the god
Hokushin, for whom he had a special reverence. His father was a
mirror-maker, strangely enough, since it was in _Ukeyoye_, the "Mirror
of the Passing World," that Hokusai was to win his immortality. He began
humbly. A boy of keen intelligence, he is said to have been a
bookseller's assistant when he was twelve, imbibing an early interest in
books. Next, at the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to a
wood-engraver, and the work he did in this capacity during four years
must have been of great value to him when, later, designing his prints,
and though some of his early woodcuts are still extant, and perhaps are
not remarkable, I can feel the technical spirit that influenced his
designs to their splendid simplicity. Yet craftsmanship did not suffice,
and at the impressionable age of eighteen he resolved to devote himself
to art. He entered the studio of Katsukawa Shunsho, one of the most
distinguished masters of the _Ukeyoye_ school, who made a specialty of
delineating actors in dramatic parts. He had a great influence and a
number of pupils, and so readily did Hokusai conform to his conditions
that he was soon allowed to call himself Katsukawa Shunro, with which
name for a while he signed his prints. Having learnt, however, all that
he wanted of Shunsho's teaching, Hokusai's natural independence irked at
the restricted conventions of _Ukeyoye_, even though he experienced and
reflected the masterly influence of Kiyonaga's style. So he turned for
inspiration to the Kano school of painting, but this "treachery" so
roused his master that he was incontinently expelled from the studio,
and forbidden to use the name that Shunsho had awarded him. This
artistic adventure, however, came to an end when Hokusai, having painted
for a dealer a poster in the Kano manner, which was alien to his
temperament, saw it torn in pieces as bad work by Shunsho's favourite
pupil, and kept silence under the indignity, for he realised the
criticism was just, and never forgot it. "If Shunko had not insulted
me," he said long afterwards, "I should never have become a great
draughtsman." During his early years he was feeling for a style of his
own, adopting the manner first of one master that appealed to him, then
of another, assuming a new name for the practice of each, though his
drawing would always reflect something of his own personality in an
accent of realism. He illustrated many books, but in his attempts to
discover his own art he was reduced to such poverty that for a bare
subsistence he hawked trifles in the streets of Yedo. In 1789, however,
the year he began an odd friendship and collaboration with Bakin, the
celebrated novelist, an unexpected commission to paint a festival banner
was so generously paid for, that for the time he was comparatively "set
upon his feet." Hokusai's reputation as a painter now increased, and he
set himself again to the practical study of various chosen artists,
especially of the Tosa school and the Ming painters of China, and from
these studies he evolved his matchless personal style. Innumerable are
the stories that exemplify the simple straightforwardness and generous
self-denial of Hokusai's life, and the unbending independence of his
character, especially in any question that affected his art, as, for
instance, the stand he made for the national honour in his dealing with
the Dutch ship's doctor. In 1799 for the first time he took the name of
Hokusai, and in 1804 it was that he secured the wondering favour of the
multitude by painting on a colossal scale, and with extraordinary means,
a figure of the piercing-eyed Dharma, the most powerful of the saints of
Znism, and a favourite subject of the medieval artists, crowning this
success by meeting in professional rivalry, in the Shogun's presence, a
celebrated _Ukeyoye_ artist, and beating him by a trick of humorous
audacity that was not without a touch of fantastic genius, which
appealed to the imagination of the people.

With a boundless energy for work, Hokusai produced, besides remarkable
book illustrations and treatises of various kinds, on drawing, design,
dancing and old legends, an endless number of separate prints marked by
fertile inventiveness and individual character. There were charming
_surimonos_, social or festival greetings with a fancifully personal
touch; groups of gracious girls in the style of Utamaro, but with a
realism of Hokusai's own in the vitality of their movement, some
gathering fungi, others picking tea-leaves, or boating at the season of
cherry-blossom, or incidents in the easy lives of the courtezans. Then,
there was the series known as _Walks round the Eastern Capital_, among
which was a print of the Dutch quarters at Nagasaki, with the passing
natives looking with amused curiosity at the foreigners grouped behind
the window bars, and a particularly interesting one of the interior of a
print-shop, the proprietor busy among his assistants with a customer.
Another set was the _Fifty-three Stages of the Tokaido Road_, showing
lively humours characteristic of each place--a subject that Hiroshige
also treated on a larger scale--while others were _Views of Yedo_,
_Views of Osaka_, _Chinese and Japanese Heroes_, one of which was the
remarkable _Spirit of the Waterfall_, and various birds, flowers and
fish, exquisitely studied from nature, with a synthetic magic of art.
Hokusai's art, in its finer manifestations, was disciplined by an
intellect that penetrated intuitively to the individual idea in all
pictorial subject-matter, and Sir Charles Holmes, writing of the
wonderful _Mangwa_--spontaneous sketches--which appeared in 1812, and
continued publication, in fourteen volumes, over thirty years of
Hokusai's life, says that it "comprises drawings of almost everything
that can be the subject of pictorial art. Majestic landscapes mix with
pots and pans, artisans and acrobats accompany the gods and heroes of
Japanese legend. All alike are drawn with a touch that, in its
squareness, its seizing of emphatic angles, has something of the best
realistic tradition of China." While its genius is abundant in humour,
together with the _Gwafu_, a work of like character, its universality
illustrates all old Japan of actuality and imagination.

It is, however, for his great colour-prints pure and simple that Hokusai
appeals to us especially here; not, of course, for the actual printing
from the colour blocks, which, like the engraving, is in Japan the work
of facsimile craftsmen, but for the expressive art which gave his
designs their grandeur, variety of form and pattern, their vital
significance, their appropriate harmonies of colour. We must turn first
of all to the _Thirty-Six Views of Fuji_, extended to forty-six,
published between 1823 and 1829, where we shall find designs
imaginatively great, made beautifully expressive by the simplest
arrangement of tints, boldly yet subtly spaced, suggesting perhaps
"light that never was on sea or land." _Fuji in Fine Weather_, for
instance, where the snow-crested mountain takes the eye majestically in
a flush of red sunlight against a blue sky streaked with white clouds,
while its lower slopes are overgrown with verdure, and _Fuji above the
Lightning_ (Plate 1) where a variation is played upon the same colour
notes, while the beautiful form of the red mountain towers in calm
indifference to the angers of Heaven. These are indeed lordly prints,
giving us the very enchantment of the scene, but what is to be said of
_The Hollow of the Deep Sea Wave off Kanagawa_ (Plate 2) showing distant
Fuji, all white and calm in a grey and pink sky, while turbulent billows
toss long, crowded boats about, and the foaming crest of the waves
rises, shaping itself into the fanciful resemblance of some fierce wild
bird with cruel talons? Light and dark blue are the dominant hues of
this wonderful design, yet, although the interpretation of nature is
purely imaginative, with no touch of realism, the impression of truth is
irresistible. But the impression of truth is everywhere in this dramatic
survey of Mount Fuji in her actual surroundings, for it is made by a
painter whose pictorial magic could command realism or fancy at will to
an equal logic of interpretation. So we always find the mountain
significantly related in the picture to whatever may be the subject.
Perhaps it is a party in a tea-house impressed by some aspect of her
beauty, or she may tower, black, red and white, above a crowd of naked
coolies, carrying men and merchandise across sand banks, or haply she
may smile at Yoshiwara girls watching a Daimios procession, or look
wisely upon horsemen galloping towards the river Sumida, or, grey beyond
the mists, may gaze on a picnic party by a famous old spreading pine, or
peep between the piers of a crowded arched bridge, or, clad
indifferently in the mists or the beautiful lights of day or evening,
she may accept the awed wonder of sightseers on a pagoda balcony, of
workmen repairing a roof, whether of a Buddhist temple or a popular shop
in Yedo, and, always symbolical of home, the sight of Fuji cheers the
people active in the tea-fields, the timber-yards, or their
fishing-boats. It is impossible here to particularise all the superb
designs in which Fuji figures in every aspect of her beauty.

The eight prints of the _Famous Waterfalls_ were published in 1827, and,
though different in character, are no less notable than the Fuji set for
their splendour of design, coherent spacing, and dramatic significance.
Inspired perhaps by the thirteenth century Tosa masterpiece, the Nachi
cascade, so often sung by the poets, Hokusai sought to picture chosen
falls, and succeeded in making his own masterpieces. Among these was the
_Waterfall of On, on the Kisokaid_ (Plate 3), with the gigantic volume
of water falling from a high cliff into the turbulent stream far below,
the formal dark blue and white of the water contrasting with the red,
yellow, green and grey of the surroundings. Then we find delineated, in
each of the eleven _Novel Views of Famous Bridges_, some ingeniously
built bridge, artistically related to its natural environment, and shown
with characteristic vitality serving human purposes. Here, for instance,
is the _Fukui Bridge_ (Plate 4), built half of yellow wood by a poor
Daimio, and half of stone by a wealthy one, to connect their respective
estates. What activity there is on the peopled bridge, how monumentally
calm the hilly landscape beyond! Finally we arrive at what is considered
to be the last of Hokusai's important series of colour-prints, _The
Hundred Poems explained by the Nurse_, an anthology of which only
twenty-seven poems are known to have been pictorially interpreted by
him, but the designs are fertile in imagination and invention, and
charming in their schemes of colour. Those chosen for reproduction are
typical. This handsome bullock cart, with master and servants resting by
the way, and red leaves falling (Plate 5), illustrates the exiled
Kwank's poem to the god enshrined in the Tamuke mountain, offering
humbly a "brocade of maple leaves" in place of gifts of silk for his
temple. Abe no Nakamaro (Plate 6), sent to China by the Emperor, in A.D.
716, with some sinister design, stands on a hillock overlooking a space
of waters, with his servants making obeisance, and wonders whether the
moon he sees is the same that rises over his native hills. A lively
picture of waves and rocks, and women diving for _awabi_ shells, with
men rowing by in a boat, illustrates the banished Takamura's appeal to
the fisherwomen (Plate 7). Men warming themselves at a log fire outside
a snowbound hut (Plate 8) stands for a poet's homely thought, but there
is a poem by Narihara delightfully interpreted by red maple leaves
floating on a stream, while excited people pause on a high arched bridge
to gaze at the transient beauty. By such delicately subtle motives would
the pictorial genius of Hokusai be inspired as vitally as by the
majestic beauty of a mountain, a waterfall, or a wave of the sea.

                                             MALCOLM C. SALAMAN.




PLATE I

FUJI ABOVE THE LIGHTNING


No. 9 (de Goncourt's order) "Thirty-six Views of Fuji," published
between 1823 and 1829 by Yeijudo.

_From a proof in the collection of Charles Ricketts, Esq., R.A., and
Charles Shannon, Esq., R.A._

(9-1/2  14-3/8 ins.)

[Illustration]




PLATE II

THE HOLLOW OF THE DEEP SEA WAVE OFF KANAGAWA ON THE TOKAIDO


No. 20 (de Goncourt's order) "Thirty-six Views of Fuji," published
between 1823 and 1829 by Yeijudo.

_From a proof in the collection of Charles Ricketts, Esq., R.A., and
Charles Shannon, Esq., R.A._

(9-3/4  14-1/2 ins.)

[Illustration]




PLATE III

WATERFALL OF ONO, ON THE KISOKAID


From the "Famous Waterfalls" Series of 8 prints, published about 1827 by
Yeijudo.

_From a proof in the collection of C. Geoffrey Holme, Esq._

(15-1/8  10-1/8 ins.)

[Illustration]




PLATE IV

FUKUI BRIDGE IN THE PROVINCE OF ECHIZEN


From the "Famous Bridges" Series of 11 prints, published 1827-30 by
Yeijudo.

_From a proof in the collection of C. Geoffrey Holme, Esq._

(9-5/8  14-1/4 ins.)

[Illustration]




PLATE V


_Poem by Kwank._ "At the present time since no offering I could bring,
lo, Mount Tanuk! here are brocades of red leaves at the pleasure of the
God." No. 24 of "The Hundred Poems explained by the Nurse." Published
about 1830 by Yeijudo.

_From a proof in the collection of C. Geoffrey Holme, Esq._

(9-3/4  14-1/4 ins.)

[Illustration]




PLATE VI


_Poem by Abe No Nakamaro._ "O can it be that the moon I see wandering
out into the wilderness of sky is the same moon that rises over Mikasa
Hill in my own Kasuga?" No. 7 of "The Hundred Poems explained by the
Nurse." Published about 1830 by Yeijudo.

_From a proof in the collection of C. Geoffrey Holme, Esq._

(9-1/4  13-7/8 ins.)

[Illustration]




PLATE VII


_Poem by Sangi Takamura._ "Tell the people, O boats of fisherwomen, that
I row to the Eighty Isles, far in the boundless main." No. 11 of "The
Hundred Poems explained by the Nurse." Published about 1830 in Yedo by
Yeijudo.

_From a proof in the collection of C. Geoffrey Holme, Esq._

(9-1/4  14-1/4 ins.)

[Illustration]




PLATE VIII


_Poem by Minamotu No Munayuki._ "Winter loneliness in a mountain hamlet
grows only deeper when guests are gone, and leaves and grass are
withered, so runs my thought." From "The Hundred Poems explained by the
Nurse." Published about 1830 by Yeijudo, of Yedo.

_From a proof in the collection of C. Geoffrey Holme, Esq._

(9-3/4  14-1/4 ins.)

[Illustration]


Transcriber's Notes:

KISOKAID changed to KISOKAID for consistency.




[End of _Hokusai_ by Malcolm C. Salaman]
