In spite of the enormous mass of his work, he remained poor, though he had no expensive habits, no love for wine or gay company, though he lived on the simplest food, though his clothes and furniture were those of an absolute pauper. Yet, though an ascetic by habit, he was by no means intolerant. In his preface to Cooking at a Moment’s Notice (1803) he writes: “If there be a moralist who has said that at the first cup it is the man who drinks the saké, at the second it is the saké that drinks the saké, and at the third it is the saké that drinks the man, there are others less severe, who declare that there is no limit to saké drinking, so long as it brings no disorder with it.” The truth is, he cared for nothing but his art, and grudged even the time necessary to open the packets of money he received in payment for his drawings. He kept these packets lying by his table. When a tradesman called with a bill, the artist handed him a packet of money without a word, and continued drawing. The tradesman went off and opened his packet. Sometimes he found the amount inside was many times that of the bill; in that case he held his tongue. If the money was insufficient, he went back and demanded more. No wonder that Hokusai was always a poor man! His devotion to his art made him proud and inaccessible to those who came to buy his drawings without showing him proper deference; but many stories are told of his kindness to children, and of his behaving with great delicacy of feeling under trying circumstances. Though his artistic reputation among his own class was enormous, and had even spread to the Shogunal court, he was only known by sight to his intimate friends. There is a well-known story of his spending the evening with three strangers. The party on breaking up could only find a common, unpainted lantern to light them home. It was jestingly suggested that this should be painted. Hokusai, taking a brush, covered the surface rapidly with figures, till one of his companions innocently remarked, “You seem to have some talent for drawing.”
Poverty, and even dirt, are not rare accompaniments of genius, but it is rare to find a great artist living for nearly a century among the working-classes, his chief customers, to whom in life he was known mainly for his power of drawing in odd ways, such as making pictures out of casual blots of ink, and by whom in death he was immediately forgotten, and yet all the while, among these mean surroundings and ignorant companions, having the courage to adhere firmly to the high ideals he had conceived. Hokusai’s own words from his preface to the Hundred Views of Fuji are the best evidence of his spirit.
“From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the forms of things. By the time I was fifty I had published an infinity of designs; but all I have produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At seventy-three I have learned a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes, and insects. In consequence, when I am eighty, I shall have made still more progress; at ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of things; at a hundred I shall certainly have reached a marvellous stage; and when I am a hundred and ten, everything I do, be it but a dot or a line, will be alive.
I beg those who live as long as I to see if I do not keep my word.
“Written at the age of seventy-five by me, once Hokusai, to-day Gwakio Rojin, the old man mad about drawing.”
Except his daughter, Oyei, Hokusai had no pupils in the ordinary sense of the word, but he had followers who were able to catch something of his manner. Of these his son-in-law Shigenobu was the earliest; but his mature style was more closely imitated by Hokkei, a fishmonger turned artist (and a graceful artist, too), who taught Gakutei the celebrated designer of surimonos, and Hokuba, whose book illustrations show a genuine appreciation of Hokusai’s dexterity, but lack his spirit and insight. The remaining artists who directly imitated Hokusai need not be taken into account, but three other painters of distinct originality owe much to his influence. Of these the roué Keisai Yeisen and the genial Kiosai, a modern in point of date (he died only a few years ago), display other influences so strongly that their works are not likely to be confused with those of their great predecessor. The third, Yosai, a classical artist of extraordinary power and delicacy, whose chief work is a series of portraits of the great personages of early Japan, owes most of his merit to the fact that he had the sense to combine with the grace and dignity of the Tosa tradition in which he was nurtured, much of the vigour and life that inspired the great master of the popular school. Nevertheless, if we seek to trace the influence of Hokusai, we shall not find its clearest evidences in such work as this, any more than we can lay at his door the utter decay into which the Tosa, Buddhist, and Kano schools have fallen. It is on the work of the Japanese artisans, the flowers, the figures, the landscapes, that decorate the things of everyday use, the pottery, the bronze, the lacquer, the netstikés, that the great master of the popular school has left the most enduring impression. That these are mere articles of commerce, that the impulse that first gave them life has long departed, matters but little. We recognise their inferiority only when we track the spring of their inspiration to the fountain-head, where any loss that we may feel is more than compensated.
HOKUSAI’S PRINTS AND DRAWINGS
THE student of Hokusai’s work is confronted at once with two difficulties — the enormous bulk of his output, and the practical impossibility of looking at more than a fraction even of the small proportion of his prints and drawings that have reached Europe. Hokusai, as we have seen, lived to his ninetieth year, and for the greater part of his life did nothing but draw. The latest catalogue makes him the illustrator of nearly a hundred and sixty different publications, many of them comprising a number of volumes. As the volumes contain on an average fifty pages apiece, each with its illustration, the quantity of his engraved work alone almost defies computation. In addition to this enormous mass of prints, we have to reckon with the studies for these compositions, as well as the innumerable random sketches made to please his own fancy or that of a customer, and with the more elaborate paintings, of which only a limited number have ever been exported. We must always remember, too, that Hokusai, though popular with the lower classes, was hardly known, even by name, to amateurs of position, except perhaps in his native Yedo. His drawings and prints were not usually bought or kept by the wealthy. They were the ephemeral amusement of artisans and shopkeepers, and were lost or thrown aside when they had served their immediate purpose. If, a century hence, our public libraries had been destroyed, and any intelligent Japanese were to discover supreme merit in the drawings of some popular illustrator of one of the halfpenny comic papers of to-day, he would have nearly as much difficulty in forming a representative collection of the work he admired as we have in the case of Hokusai. Though a number of his prints in very varied degrees of perfection are not uncommon, his drawings and paintings are for the most part inaccessible to the general public, remaining as they do in the hands of a few collectors. Thus, while the one existing catalogue raisonné, the work of M. Edmond de Goncourt, is by no means complete or invariably accurate, the wonder is that it could ever have been compiled at all. In the few pages here available nothing of the kind can be attempted. All that is possible is to indicate the sections into which Hokusai’s work naturally divides, and to discuss only what there is a reasonable chance of seeing.
It will be best to speak of the prints before the drawings, because they are more generally accessible, and more characteristic of the artist’s whole purpose. Luckily a chronological arrangement is not only convenient but natural, since, as indicated by the artist’s own words, the work done in the first fifty years of his life — that is, up to the year 1810 — is quite distinct from that of the last forty. On this basis the engraved work may be classified as follows: —
(a) All work done up to 1810 — Novels, surimonos, and the Views of Yedo.
(b) The books of sketches — The Mangwa, the Gwafu, and their companions, with the Hundred Views of Fuji.
(c) The books of legendary subjects in the Chinese manner.
(d) The large sets of plates, the Thirty-six Views of Fuji, the Bridges, t
he Waterfalls, etc.
As we have seen, Hokusai began his art education under the eyes of Shunsho. His prints of this period would pass for those of his master; but his work soon after leaving the school is so unlike that of the older man that one is not surprised at their quarrel. Shunsho’s ladies are short and plump; Hokusai’s are as tall and slender as those of Utamaro. Shunsho’s colour is a delicate harmony of pink, grey, yellow, and pale green; Hokusai uses a powerful green, a warm brown, and occasionally strong blues and definite crimson, which are not attuned so easily. The drawing of the younger man is already exquisitely refined, as we can see from the surimono, which are more carefully engraved and printed than the picture-books. Indeed these dainty little works, which are, alas! only too rare, represent Hokusai’s early work at its best; just as in the novels, from the intrusion of the text into the page and from dependence on the subject-matter of the story, it is seen at its very worst. These surimonos are interesting, too, as evidence of the strong hold that the Tosa miniature painting had upon Hokusai when he started as an independent designer, though later his plates of the play of the Forty-seven Ronins show that he had not forgotten the forcible Ukiyo-ye art in which he was trained. This series appeared in 1802; but from the three sets of Yedo views that appeared about the same time, it is evident that his horizon was rapidly widening.
In 1796 he had come in contact with the rules of perspective through a fellow-countryman, Shiba Gokan, who had studied a Dutch book on the subject; while it is evident from the Promenade of the Eastern Capital, published in black at the end of 1799, and in colour in 1802, that he had been looking carefully at the popular guide-books illustrated in the Chinese style. Possibly it was thus that he was led to appreciate the great art of the mainland, with its vigorous if mannered naturalism, that was to be an increasingly prominent influence in his drawing. During the next four years he made enormous progress, and The Streams of the Sumida River, published in 1804, looks like the work of another hand. The pictures in the earlier book are broken up by bars and streamers of conventional pink clouds; the figures are for the most part too numerous and too tiny, the landscapes wearisome with excess of detail. Only here and there does some more successful design — a bridge packed with a struggling crowd, or a wide plain under snow — give some hint of greatness. The Sumida River is full of delightful animated groups, no longer mere dots in a fantastic panorama, but really important features in the design; while in the landscapes the barred clouds are gone, and only so much scenery is introduced as in it make the whole effective and coherent. In the same way, though the figures remain conventional in their tallness, their actions are no longer conventional (Pl. 1.). The naturalness, which was the backbone of the Chinese tradition, was beginning to produce its effect, and the absolute freedom of the Mangwa, revolutionary as it seemed to the artist’s contemporaries, was really only one more step in a regular process of evolution.
The Mangwa is a series of volumes of sketches of all kinds of subjects. As the dates of the appearance of the earlier part of the series are uncertain, it is impossible to say more than that internal evidences point to the series having started some years before 1817, the latest date proposed. As odd volumes of the Mangwa are not uncommon, a short description of the contents of each may be useful to chance purchasers, as well as evidence of the ground covered by Hokusai in his search for perfection. It should be remembered that Japanese volumes are read the reverse way to European books.
1. Children, gods, priests, fishermen, acrobats, workmen, ladies at their toilet, men sleeping, praying, walking, animals real and imaginary, birds, insects, plants, fish, mountains, ships, grasses, trees, buildings, waterfalls.
2. The phoenix, dragons, gods, saints, workmen, women and men variously engaged, masks, utensils, rustic steps and stones for rockeries, landscapes, flowers, birds, animals, and fish, with a magnificent plate of a breaking wave (Pls. II. and III.).
3. Miners, wrestlers, dancers, negroes, various heroic figures and fantastic animals, among them a dragon-like sea-serpent.
4. Mythological heroes, birds, plants, trees, rocks, ships, men swimming and diving.
5. Architectural and mythological subjects, and a noble view of Fuji seen from the sea.
6. Archers, riders, fencers, musketeers, and wrestlers.
7. A series of magnificent landscapes with effects of storm (Pl. IV.).
8. Weavers, gymnasts, little landscapes, and caricatures of fat and thin men.
9. Subjects from history and mythology, including a noble design of soldiers marching among snow-clad mountains (Pl. V.), also some amusing pages depicting fat men.
10. Acrobats, jugglers, and some unpleasant ghosts (Pl. VI.).
11. People variously employed, wrestlers, guns and cannon.
12. The rarest of all. Caricatures.
13. Landscapes, preparations of rice, picture of an elephant’s toilet, and a tiger carried down a waterfall.
14 and 15 were not published till nearly two years after Hokusai’s death, and are made up from his sketches of animals.
At the risk of wearying the reader I have gone into some detail in the case of this series, because the volumes are not easy to identify without some description, and in no better way could one exhibit the vast field of inquiry upon which Hokusai entered. His aims and methods will be spoken of elsewhere; it is enough to say here that within the limits of their schemes of black, grey, and pale pink, the good things in the Mangwa were never surpassed, even by Hokusai himself, though the collection of his compositions published in the year of his death in three volumes, under the title of Hokusai Gwafu, maintains a higher average of excellence. (This is the form in which the book is usually found. It is really a reprint of two earlier books, the Hokusai Gwashiki (1819) and the Hokusai Sogwa (1820).) Page after page reveals designs of the greatest variety and magnificence, the simple tints of the Mangwa being supported in many of the plates by a printing in blue, which harmonises delightfully with the grey and coral pink. Opening a volume at random, one lights upon a great basket of flowers, the chrysanthemum, the narcissus, the iris, and the like, and on the next page we pass into a frozen marshy plain, through which a stream meanders among the deep snowdrifts, while far away a huge white mountain rises out of sight into a cold sky (Pl. XV.). Turning once more we come upon an upland path, where porters go to and fro with their burdens; by the roadside a man and a woman sit smoking, while a faggot-carrier sits on his bundle to get a light from a friend. On the next page the scene changes to the seashore, where a company of crabs of different breeds and sizes scramble about among the sand and seaweed; another turn and we are again inland among the hills at moonrise; in the hollow below runs a river, up which a man is punting a boat towards a high wooden bridge [this design, by the way, is remarkable for an attempt at drawing trees reflected in water]: while a sixth turn shows us a warrior, armed from head to foot, pausing before a palisaded cave, in which another sits sword in hand. Then come a group of fish, another landscape, a flock of birds, a beautiful group of flowers (chiefly the carnation and convolvulus), and so the series goes on, with masterpiece after masterpiece. Two other volumes, the Sautai Gwafu and the Ippitsu Gwafu, published in 1815 and 1823, deserve mention from the similarity of name, but are merely collections of sketches recalling the less important drawings of some of the Mrangwa, with which they are contemporary. A third book, the Dotchu Gwafu (1830), is generally known, from its subject, as the Tokaido series. Reprints of it are common; but, though containing some good designs, the volume is not of first-class importance.
The famous Hundred Views of Fuji (1834) is so well known in this country through the edition published in 1880 (London: B. T. Batsford), with an admirable commentary by Mr. F. V. Dickins, that any lengthy description of the three delightful volumes would be superfluous. The reprints, it is true, are much inferior to the early versions, but they are cheap and comparatively common, while even in worn and hastily-printed impressions the grandeur of the designs is extraordinary. Su
ch prints as Fuji viewed through bamboos, the first upheaval of the sacred mountain, and the plate in which it rises above a grove of pine woods, on the far side of a misty river, when once seen are not easily forgotten.
The last of Hokusai’s books to deserve mention are three volumes of pictures of legendary heroes — The Personages of Suikoden (1829), The Heroes of China and Japan (1836), and The Glories of China and Japan (1850). The first of these works is comparatively peaceful, but the two latter are packed from end to end with fierce struggling figures, conquerors of giants, demons, strange beasts, and occasionally more human enemies (Pl. XX.). In no other work does Hokusai’s reverence for his Chinese predecessors show so clearly. The heroes themselves are usually Tartars; their elaborate armour and weapons, though Japanese in design, are not drawn in the fluent Japanese manner, but with an angular realism and exact rendering of detail that is not found except in the early art of the mainland. The books seem to have given the engravers some trouble. Judging from existing sketches, Hokusai had trained men to follow with extraordinary accuracy the delicate sweeping lines that characterise his more purely Japanese work; and in such books as the Gwafu very little of the spirit of the drawings was lost. With the volumes of heroes it was different. The set of finished drawings for the Suikoden still exists, and a glance at it shows that the change of style on the artist’s part had been too much for the woodcutters. The drawings, with all their spirit, have the cosmopolitan suavity of the most perfect naturalism — many of the figures, indeed, are quite worthy of Rembrandt (Pl. XIX.). In the reproductions this suavity is translated into corners and angles and conventional black patches that reduce the designs once more to things essentially Oriental.
Masters of Art - Katsushika Hokusai Page 10