that I will be forced to go to Edo, in person, so I will visit you secretly and give you, orally, all the details that you may need. In this harsh season, above all during my travels, all things are very difficult, and among others, living in this severe cold with one lone robe, at the age of seventy-six. I ask you to think of the sad conditions in which I find myself, but my arm (here a sketch of his arm) has not weakened the least, and I work with determination. My only pleasure is becoming a good artist.” Atthe end of the letter, he represents himself in a microscopic sketch, humbly saluting between his hat and his drawing set on the ground. Hokusai loved postscripts, and so his letter continues: “I recommend that the engraver not add the lower eyelid when I do not draw it; for the noses, these two noses are mine (here a drawing of a nose in profile and from the front) and those that one is accustomed to engraving are Utagawa’s noses, which I do not like at all and counter the rules of drawing. It is also fashionable to draw eyes this way (here, drawings of eyes with a black dot in the centre), but I do not like these eyes any more than the noses.” Hokusai ended his letter with this sentence: “As my life, at this moment, is not public, I will not give you my address here.”
Chinese Goddess Taichen Wang Furen and a Dragon with Qin, 1798.
Diptych, ink, colour and gofun on paper, each sheet: 125.4 × 56.5 cm.
Private collection.
Finally, in a letter from 1842, sent to editors Hanabusa Keikiti and Hanabuza Bunzô after his return to Edo, he remained in hiding: “A thousand thanks for your latest friendly visit and also for not abandoning an old man, and yet again for your nice New Year’s gift. Since last spring, my prodigal grandson has behaved deplorably; I have had, every day, to occupy myself with cleaning up the results of his filthy life, and I am at the point of sending him away. But he has found, as always, characters much too indulgent who have made me wait until the day he commits a new, more serious error. However, at the beginning of this year, I had to have his father Yanagawa Shighenobu take him to the Montzu province (a northern province), but he is easily capable of escaping along the way. Until then, I can breathe a little. Here are the reasons that have kept me from coming to thank you for the book by Soga Monogatari (an old book loaned to him). This New Year, I had neither money, nor clothing, and I am only able to feed myself poorly and not seeing my real New Year start until the middle of its second month. In the second month of last year, when Yeibun came to see me, I had already finished two volumes of Suiko (ninety-volume novel started in 1807), but I have not been able to advance any further. In sum, I lost an entire year because of my mischievous grandson and I regret this precious year lost. I have kept your Soga Monogatari for a long time, but I hope that you can leave it with me until the second month when I will come visit you. Another recommendation, send me, as soon as possible, the silk for painting the goddess Daghiniten (the goddess represented mounted on a fox), because time passes as quickly as an arrow and you had asked me to deliver this painting to you in the second month. If the text of Gaden is ready, send it to me when you send me the silk, also send the price for the illustration of the two volumes of Gaden. When you come, do not ask for Hokusai, no one will know how to answer you, ask for the priest who draws and who recently moved into the building owned by Gorobei in the courtyard of the Mei-ô-in Temple, in the middle of the woods (small forest of Asakusa).”
As capricious as all the great artists, Hokusai was not always in good humour and took a malicious pleasure in being disagreeable towards people who did not show him the deference he thought was due to him or who were, quite simply, unpleasant, as these anecdotes show.
Onoye Baïkô, a great actor of the time, recognised Hokusai’s very particular talent for inventing ghosts, and asked the painter to use his imagination to draw a being from another world to serve as a representation of a character on a theatrical set. The actor invited the painter to come see him, which Hokusai avoided doing. The actor then decided to visit him. He found the workshop so dirty that he did not dare sit on the ground. He had his travelling blanket brought, upon which he greeted Hokusai. The painter, offended, did not turn around, continuing to paint and the illustrious Baïkô, unhappy, left. But he wanted his drawing so much that he had the ‘weakness’ to excuse himself to Hokusai to obtain it. At the same time, Hokusai received a visit from a supplier to the shogun, who came to ask him for a drawing. It is not clear what displeased Hokusai, but we do know, however, that the painter took some lice from his robe and roughly threw them on the visitor, saying that because he was very busy, he was not available. The visitor resigned himself to waiting and obtained the drawing he wanted. But this latter had barely left when Hokusai, running after him, yelled at him in a jeering voice: “Do not forget, if people ask you how my studio is, to tell them that it is very beautiful! Very clean!”
The same fantasy is expressed in his work. In 1804, Hokusai completed, in the form of a public improvisation, a large format painting of a Darma. This event made great waves, and piqued the curiosity of the Tokugawa shogun, who had wanted to see the master work, even though under the Tokugawa, and to this day, no commoner could present himself before the shogun. Thus, one autumn day, upon returning from a hunt with his falcon, the shogun had Hokusai summoned and entertained himself by watching the painter execute his drawings. Suddenly, Hokusai, covering half of an immense piece of paper with indigo, made roosters, after plunging their feet into purple ink, run across it. The prince, surprised, had the illusion of seeing the Tatsuta River with its rapids sweeping up purple momiji leaves in its waters.
Women with a Telescope, excerpt from the series The Seven Bad Habits (Fūryū nakute nana kuse), late 1790s.
Ōban, nishiki-e.
Kobe City Museum, Kobe.
Young Woman Applying Makeup seen from behind; above, a Poem in Chinese by Santō Kyōden, c. 1800.
Paint on paper, 132.9 × 49.4 cm.
Ōta Memorial Museum, Tokyo.
Young Dandy, c. 1800–1801.
Coloured ink on silk, 33.9 × 20.3 cm.
Rikardson-Kawano Collection, Tokyo.
In 1817, during one of Hokusai’s trips to Nagoya, the painter received an order for many book illustrations. Since his students vaunted the accuracy of representation of the beings and things in his drawings, particularly those in small formats, critics of ‘vulgar painting’ retorted that the little things produced by Hokusai’s brush were crafts and not art. These words hurt Hokusai and led him to say that, if a painter’s talent consisted in the size of the dimensions of his strokes and his works, he was ready to surprise his critics. This was when his student, Bokusen, and his friends came to help him execute, in public, a tremendous painting, a Darma of very different proportions than the one he painted in 1804. It was completed on the fifth day of the tenth month of the year, in front of the temple of Nishig-hakejo. The Japanese biography of Hokusai tells about this, from a story in drawings by Yenko-an, a friend of the painter.
In the middle of the north courtyard of the temple, protected by a fence, was spread a paper, specially made several times thicker than ordinary paper. On this piece of paper, Hokusai would paint a surface equivalent to that of 120 mats. Knowing that a Japanese mat measures 90 cm wide by 180 cm tall, this gave the artist a painting area 194 m long! To keep the paper stretched out, a very thick bed of rice straw was made, and at points, pieces of wood were set, serving as weights to keep the wind from lifting the paper. A scaffold was set up against the council chamber, facing the public. At the top of the scaffold, pulleys were attached to ropes in order to lift the immense drawing, fixed to a gigantic wood beam. Large brushes had been prepared, the smallest being the width of a broom. India ink was stored in enormous vats, to then be poured into a cask. These preparations
