Edmond de Goncourt
Hokusai
Author:
Edmond de Goncourt
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ISBN: 978-1-78310-499-4
Edmond de Goncourt
Hokusai
Contents
Foreword
I. Life of Hokusai
II. Surimonos, Yellow Books, and Illustrated Novels
1. Surimonos
2. Yellow Books
3. Illustrated Novels
III. Manga and Sketchbooks
1. Manga
2. Sketchbooks
3. Colour Sketchbooks
IV. Poetry Albums, Plates, Panels, and Other Works
1. Kyoka Poetry Albums with Colour Plates
2. Albums of Drawings
3. Separate Plates (Prints)
4. Kakemonos and Makimonos
5. Fans, Screens, and Folding Screens
Fans:
Screens:
Folding Screens:
6. Albums of Early Ideas
7. Shunga
8. Miscellaneous Works Illustrated by Hokusai
9. Miscancellaneous Works Containing Drawings by Hokusai
Biography
Glossary
List of Illustrations
Self-Portrait of Hokusai at Eighty-Three, 1842.
Ink on paper, 26.9 x 16.9 cm.
Rijksmuseum Volkenkunde, Leiden.
Hokusai’s talent travelled across land and sea to Europe long ago. But his work, so original, so diverse, and so prolific, still remains misunderstood. It is true that, even in the artist’s homeland, though he has always been immensely popular, his work has not been received with the same fervour by the academy and by the elite as by the Japanese people. Was he not reproached, in his own time, for only doing ‘vulgar paintings’? Then, however, few artists knew how to delve into the potential of drawing techniques and methods as he did. What artist can vaunt his ability to draw with his fingernails, his feet, or even his left hand (if right-handed) or inverted, with such virtuosity, that it seems to have been drawn in the most conventional way?
Hokusai illustrated more than 120 works, one of which, the Suiko-Gaden, consisted of ninety volumes. He collaborated on about thirty volumes: yellow books and popular books at first, eastern and western promenades, glimpses of famous places, practical manuals for decorators and artisans, a life of Sakyamuni, a conquest of Korea, tales, legends, novels, biographies of heroes and heroines and the thirty-six women poets and one hundred male poets, with songbooks and multiple albums of birds, plants, patrons of new fashion, books on education, morals, anecdotes, and fantastic and natural sketches.
Hokusai tried everything, and succeeded. He was tireless, multitalented, and brilliant. He accumulated drawings upon drawings, stamps upon stamps, informing himself very specifically about his compatriots, their work, and their interests, and about the people in the streets, those in the fields, and those on the sea. He opened the gates to the walls that hid brilliant courtesans, their silks and embroidery, and the large belt knots spread across their chests and stomachs. He frightened observers with apparitions from his most awful and stirring, fantastic imagination.
To understand the art of a very particular, distant people, it is not sufficient to learn, more or less well, their language; it is necessary to penetrate their soul, their tastes – one must be the obedient student of this soul and these tastes. It is, after all, founded on love, the profound ecstasy that artists feel in expressing their country. They love it passionately, they cherish its beauty, its clarity, and they try to reproduce its life from the heart. A happy affliction, Hokusai was an eminent representative of those who work incessantly.
- Léon Hennique
Women with a Telescope, from the series The Seven
Bad Habits (Fu-ryu- nakute nana kuse), late 1790s.
Nishiki-e (polychrome woodblock print),
36.8 x 24.8 cm. Kobe City Museum, Kobe.
Kintoki the Herculean Child with a Bear
and an Eagle, c. 1790-1795.
Nishiki-e (polychrome woodblock print),
37.2 x 24.8 cm (ōban). Ostasiatische Kunstsammlung,
Museum für Asiatische Kunst,
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin.
Hokusai was born in 1760, sometime in October or November. He was born in Edo in the Honjo neighbourhood, close to the Sumida River and to the countryside, a neighbourhood to which the painter was much attached. He even signed his drawings, for a time, “the peasant from Katsushika”, Katsushika being the provincial district where the Honjo neighbourhood is located.
According to the will left by his granddaughter, Shiraï Tati, he was the third son of Kawamura Itiroyemon, who, under the name Bunsei, would have been an artist of the new profession. Near the age of four, Hokusai, whose first name was Tokitarō, was adopted by Nakajima Ise, mirror designer for the Tokugawa royal family.
Hokusai, whilst still a child, became the assistant to a great bookseller in Edo where, whilst contemplating illustrated books, he carried out his duties as assistant so lazily and disdainfully that he was fired. Paging through the bookseller’s illustrated books and life in images for long months developed the young man’s taste and passion for drawing.
In 1774, he began an apprenticeship with a woodcutter and in 1775, under the name Tetsuzō, he engraved the last six pages of a novel by Santchô. Thus, he became a woodcutter, which he continued until the age of eighteen.
In 1778, Hokusai, then named Tetsuzō, aban-doned his profession as a woodcutter. He was no longer willing to be the interpreter, the translator of another’s talent. He was taken by the desire to invent, to compose, and to give a personal form to his creations. He had the ambition to become a painter.
He entered, at the age of eighteen, the studio of Katsukawa Shunshō, where his budding talent earned him the name of Katsukawa Shunrō. There, he painted actors and theatre sets in the style of Tsutzumi Torin and produced many loose-leaf drawings, called kyoka surimono. The master allowed him to sign, under this name, his compositions representing a series of actors, in the upright format of the drawings of actors by Shunshō, his master.
The Actor Ichikawa Ebizo IV, 1791.
Nishiki-e (polychrome woodblock print),
30.8 x 14 cm (hosoban). Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo.
The Actor Sakata Hangorō III, 1791.
Nishiki-e (polychrome woodblock print),
31.4 x 13.5 cm (hosoban). William Sturgis
Bigelow Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
At this time, the young Shunrō began to show a bit of the great sketch artist who would become the great Hokusai. With perseverance and relentless work, he continued to draw and to produce, until 1786, compositions bearing the signature of Katsukawa Shunrō, or simply, Shunrō.
In 1789, the young painter, at twenty-nine years old, was forced to leave Katsukawa’s studio under peculiar circumstances. As a matter of fact, Hokusai would keep the odd habit of perpetually moving and of never living more than one or two months in the same place.
This departure took place under the following circumstances: Hokusai had painted a poster of a stamp merchant and the merchant was so happy with the poster that he had it richly framed and placed in front of his shop. One day, one of his fellow students at the studio, who had studied there longer than he, passed the shop. He thought the poster was bad and tore it down to save the honour of the Shunshō studio. A dispute ensued between the elder and the younger student, following which Hokusai left the studio, resolving to work only from his own inspiration and to become a painter independent of the schools that preceded him.
In this country where artists seem to change names almost as often as clothes, he abandoned the signature of Katsukawa to take that of Mugura, which means shrub, telling the public that the painter bearing this new name did not belong to any studio.
Completely shaking off the yoke of the Katsukawa style, the drawings signed ‘Mugura’ are freer and adopt a personal perspective.
Hokusai married twice, but the names of his two wives are unknown. It is also not known whether or not his separation from them was due to death or divorce. It is certain that the painter lived alone after the age of fifty-two or fifty-three.
By his first wife, Hokusai had a son and two daughters. His first son, Tominosuke, took over the house of the mirror designer Nakajima Ise and led a disorderly life, causing his father many problems. His daughter Omiyo became the wife of the painter Yanagawa Shighenobu. She died shortly after her divorce and after having given birth to a grandson who was a source of tribulation for his grandfather. His second daughter, Otetsu, was a truly gifted painter who died very young.
The Actor Ichikawa Yaozo III in the
Role of Soga no Gorō and Iwai Hanshiro IV
in the Role of His Mistress, Sitting, 1791.
Nishiki-e (polychrome woodblock print), hosoban.
Japan Ukiyo-e Museum, Matsumoto.
Suehirogari, 1797-1798.
Nishiki-e (polychrome woodblock print),
20.7 x 31.9 cm. Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C.
Two Women Puppeteers, c. 1795.
Surimono, nishiki-e (polychrome woodblock print).
Private collection, United Kingdom.
The Actor Ichikawa Omezō
in the Role of Soga no Gorō, 1792.
Nishiki-e (polychrome woodblock print),
27.2 x 12.7 cm. Rijksmuseum Volkenkunde, Leiden.
By his second wife, Hokusai also had a son and two daughters. His second son, Akitiro, was a civil servant of the Tokugawa rule and a poet, and became the adopted son of Kase Sakijiuro. He erected Hokusai’s tomb and took on his name.
The grandson of Akitiro, named Kase Tchojiro, was the schoolyard friend of Hayashi, a great collector of Japanese art. Hokusai’s other daughters were Onao, who died in her childhood, and Oyei, who married a painter named Tomei but divorced him and lived with her father until the end of his life. She was an artist, who illustrated Onna Chohoki, an educational book for women covering etiquette. Hokusai had two older brothers and a younger sister, all of whom died in their childhood.
His life was filled with pitfalls. Thus, near the end of 1834, serious problems arose in the old painter’s life.
Hokusai’s daughter, Omiyo, married the painter, Yanagawa Shighenobu. The child from this marriage was a veritable good-for-nothing, whose swindles, always paid for by Hokusai, were the cause of his misery during his last years.
It is plausible that, following commitments made by the grandfather to keep his grandson from going to prison, commitments that he could not keep, he was forced to leave Edo in secret.
He took refuge more than thirty leagues away in the Sagami province, in the city of Uraga, hiding his artistic name under the common name of Miuraya Hatiyemon. Even upon returning to Edo, he did not dare, at first, give out his address and called himself the ‘priest-painter’, moving into the courtyard of the Mei-o-in temple, in the middle of a small forest.
Some interesting letters from the painter to his editors remain from this exile, which lasted from 1834 until 1839. These letters attest to the old man’s trials caused by his grandson’s mischief, and to the destitution of the great artist, who complained, one harsh winter, of having only one robe to keep his septuagenarian body warm.
These letters unveil his attempts to soften his editors, through the melancholy exposition of his misery, illustrated with nice sketches. They also unveil some of his ideas on translating his drawings into woodcuts, initiated in the language marked by crude images with which he was able to make the workers charged with printing his works understand the way to obtain artistic prints.
Depiction of a Grand Kabuki Performance in
the Eastern Capital, by the Originator of Perspective Pictures
(Uki-e genso Edo kabuki o-shibai no zu), c. 1788-1789.
Uki-e, nishiki-e (polychrome woodblock print),
26.3 x 39.3 cm. British Museum, London.
The year 1839, which followed three years of poor rice harvests, was a year of scarcity during which Japanese restrained their spending and no longer bought images. Editors refused to cover the publication costs of a book or a single plate.
During this editors’ strike, Hokusai, counting on the popularity of his name, had the idea of composing albums from “the tip of his brush”, and he earned about what he needed to live during this year from the sale of these original drawings, undoubtedly sold very cheaply.
It was in 1839 that Hokusai returned to Edo, after four years of exile in Uraga. But this was another miserable year for the artist. He had only just moved in, again settling in Honjo, the country neighbourhood that the painter loved, when a fire burnt his house; it destroyed many of his drawings, outlines, and sketches, and the painter was only able to save his brush.
At the age of sixty-eight or sixty-nine, Hokusai had an attack of apoplexy, from which he emerged by treating it with ‘lemon paste’, a remedy in Japanese medicine, whose composition was given by the painter to his friend Tosaki, with sketches in the margin of the prescription representing the lemon, the knife for cutting the lemon, and the pot.
Here is the composition of this ‘lemon paste’: “Within twenty-four Japanese hours [forty-eight hours] of the attack, take a lemon and cut it into small pieces with a bamboo knife, not an iron or copper one. Put the lemon, thus cut, into a clay pot. Add a go [one quarter of a litre] of very good sake and let it cook over low heat until the mixture thickens. Then, you must swallow, in two doses, the lemon paste, after removing the seeds in hot water; the medicinal effect will take place after twenty-four or thirty hours.”
This remedy completely cured Hokusai and seems to have kept him healthy until 1849, when he fell ill at ninety years old, in a house in Asakusa, the ninety-third home in his vagabond life of moving from one house to another.
Concert under the Wisteria, c. 1796-1804.
Nishiki-e (polychrome woodblock print),
25.2 x 38.4 cm (ōban). Musée national des
Arts asiatiques – Guimet, Paris.
Actor Ichikawa Komazô III
as Shirai Gonpachi and Actor Matsumoto
Kôshirô IV as Banzui Chôbei, c. 1791.
Diptych, nishiki-e (polychrome woodblock print),
31.8 x 13.7 cm; 31.8 x 14.4 cm.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Actor Ichikawa Komazô III as
Shirai Gonpachi and Actor Matsumoto
Kôshirô IV as Banzui Chôbei, c. 1791.
Diptych, nishiki-e (polychrome woodblock print),
31.8 x 13.7 cm; 31.8 x 14.4 cm.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Depiction of a Grand Kabuki Performance
in the Eastern Capital, by the Originator of
Perspective Pictures (Uki-e genso Edo
kabuki o-shibai no zu), c. 1779-1793.
Uki-e, nishiki-e (polychrome woodblock print).
British Museum, London.
Crossing a Bridge, from the kyōka album
The Stamping Song of Men (Otokodoka), 1798.
Nishiki-e (polychrome woodblock print),
20.6 x 36 cm (aiban). Musée national des
Arts asiatiques – Guimet, Paris.
This is, undoubtedly, when he wrote to his old friend Takaghi this ironically allusive letter: “King Yemma is very old and is preparing to retire from business. He has built, to this end, a pretty country house and he has asked me to go and paint him a kakemono. I am thus obliged to leave, and when I do leave, I will take my drawings with me. I will rent an apartment at the corner of Hell Street, where I will be happy to have you visit if you have the occasion to stop by. Hokusai.”
At the time of his last illness, Hokusai was surrounded by the filial love of his students, and was cared for by his daughter Oyei, who had divorced her husband and was living with her father.
The thoughts of the dying, ‘crazy artist’, always trying to defer his death to perfect his talent, made him repeat in a voice that was no longer more than a whisper, “If heaven would only give me ten more years…” There, Hokusai broke off, and after a pause, “if heaven would only give me five more years of life… I could become a truly great painter.”
Hokusai died at the age of ninety, on the eighteenth day of the fourth month of the second year of Kayei (10 May 1849, or according to some on 18 April). The poetry of his last moment, as he left in death, is almost untranslatable: “Oh! Freedom, beautiful freedom, when one goes into the summer fields to leave his perishable body there!”
Another tomb was erected for him by his granddaughter, Shiraï Tati, in the garden of the Seikyoji temple of Asakusa, next to the gravestone of his father, Kawamura Itiroyemon.
One can read on the large gravestone,“gakyōjin Manjino Haka” (Tomb of Manji, crazy old artist) and, on the base, “Kawamura Uji” (Kawamura family). On the left side of the gravestone, at the top, are three religious names: Firstly, Nanso-in Kiyo Hokusai shinji (the knight of the faith, Hokusai in colourful glory), Nanso (a religious figure from the South of So); Secondly, Seisen-in Ho-oku Mioju Shin-nio, the name of a woman who died in 1828, who may be his second wife; Thirdly, Jô-un Mioshin Shin-nio, the name of a woman who died in 1821, that of one of his daughters.
It is uncertain as to whether or not there is an existing authentic portrait of the master. The portrait of Hokusai, together with the novelist Bakin, after a stamp by Kuniyoshi, is no longer a portrait as the sketch represents him kneeling, offering the editor his little yellow book, “The Tactics of General Fourneau”, or of “Improvisational Cuisine”. Of the great artist, there are no childhood or adult portraits.
An Artisan’s Shop, from the album
The Mist of Sandara (Sandara kasumi), 1798.
Nishiki-e (polychrome woodblock print),
20 x 31.6 cm (aiban). Clarence Buckingham Collection,
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.
Ushigafuchi at Kudan (Kudan Ushigafuchi),
from an untitled series of landscapes
in Western style, c. 1800-1805.
Nishiki-e (polychrome woodblock print),
18 x 24.5 cm (chūban). William Sturgis
Bigelow Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
The only existing portrait is the one given by Iijima Hanjuro’s Japanese biography, a portrait of him as an old man, preserved in the family and which had been painted by his daughter Oyei, who signed ‘Ohi’. One sees a forehead furrowed by deep wrinkles, eyes marked by crow’s feet with swollen bags beneath them, and there is, in the half-closed eyes, some of that mist that sculptors of netzukes place in the look of their ascetics.
The man has a large, bony nose, a thin mouth tucked under the fold of his cheeks, and the square chin of a strong will, connected to his neck by wattles. The colouring of the image, which matches fairly closely the tone of old flesh, renders well the anaemic pallor of the bags under his eyes, around his mouth, and of his earlobes.
What is striking about the face of this man of genius is its length, from his eyebrows to his chin, and the low height and dented top of his head, with, at the temples, a few rare little hairs resembling the young grass which appears in his landscapes.
Another portrait of Hokusai, of which a facsimile was published in the Katsushika den, represents him near the age of eighty, next to a pot, crouching under a blanket, showing the profile of an old head shaking and of thin legs. The origin of this portrait is as follows: the editor Szabo ordered the illustration of the ‘Hundred Poets’, from Hokusai. The artist, before starting his work, sent a sample to determine the format of the publication and on this sample, his brush left this ‘caricature’.
The style called Hokusai-riu is the style of true ukiyo-e painting, naturalist painting, and Hokusai is the one and only founder of a painting style, based on Chinese painting, which is the style of the modern Japanese school. Hokusai victoriously lifted up paintings of his country with Persian and Chinese influences, and by a study one might call religious in nature, rejuvenated it, renewed it, and made it uniquely Japanese.
Chinese Goddess Taichen Wang
Furen and a Dragon with Qin, 1798.
Diptych, ink, colour, and gofun on paper,
125.4 x 56.5 cm each. Private collection.
Act I (Shōdan), from the illustrated book
Chūhingura (Shinpan ukie Chūhingura), c. 1798.
Nishiki-e (polychrome woodblock print),
22 x 32.7 cm (aiban). British Museum, London.
He is also a universal painter who, with very lively drawings, reproduced men, women, birds, fish, trees, flowers, and sprigs of herbs. He completed 30,000 drawings or paintings. He is also the true creator of the ukiyo-e, the founder of the ‘école vulgaire’, which is to say that he was not content to imitate the academic painters of the Tosa school, by representing, in a precious style, the splendour of the court, the official life of high dignitaries, the artificial pomp of aristocratic existence; he brought into his work the entire humanity of his country in a reality that escapes from the noble requirements of traditional Japanese painting.
He was passionate about his art, to the point of madness, and sometimes signed his productions, “the drawing madman”.
However, this painter – outside of the cult status given to him by his students – was considered by his contemporaries to be an entertainer for the masses, a low artist of works not worthy of being seen by serious men of taste in the Land of the Rising Sun. Hokusai did not receive from the public the veneration accorded to the great painters of Japan, because he devoted himself to representing ‘common life’, but since he had inherited the artistic schools of Kano and Tosa, he certainly surpassed the Okiyo and the Buncho. Ironically, it was the fact that Hokusai was one of the most original artists that prevented him from enjoying the glory he merited during his life.
He used his painting and drawing talents in the most varied of domains. The artist declared: “After having studied the painting from the various schools for a long time, I penetrated their secrets and I took away the best parts of each. Nothing is unfamiliar to me in painting. I tried my brush at everything I happened upon and succeeded.”
In fact, Hokusai painted everything from his most common images, called kamban, which is to say ‘visual advertisements’ for travelling theatre companies, all the way up to the most sophisticated compositions.
At first, Hokusai was often both the illustrator and the writer of the novel he was publishing. His literature is appreciated for its intimate observations of Japanese life. It is even sometimes attributed, as was his first novel, to the well-known novelist, Santō Kyōden.
A View of Honmoku off Kanagawa
(Kanagawa oki Honmoku no zu), from an untitled
series of landscapes in Western style, c. 1800-1805.
Nishiki-e (polychrome woodblock print),
23.3 x 35.3 cm (aiban). David Caplan Collection.
The painter’s literature also has other merits; the mocking spirit of the artist made him a parodist of the literature of his contemporaries, of their style, of their conduct, and above all, of the accumulation of affairs and of the historical jumble. This double role of writer and sketch artist only lasted until 1804, when he devoted himself exclusively to painting.
During the Kansei era (1789-1800), Hokusai wrote many stories and novels for women and children, novels for which he did his own illustrations and novels that he signed as the author Tokitarō Kakō and as the painter gakyōjin Hokusai.
It was thanks to his spiritual and precise brushstrokes that the popular stories and novels began to become known to the public. He was also an excellent poet of haiku (popular poetry). Not having had enough time to transmit all of his painting methods to his students, he engraved them into volumes that would later be highly successful.
During the Tempō era (1830-1843), Hokusai published an immense number of nishiki-e, colour prints and drawings of love, or obscene images, called shunga, with admirable shading, that he always signed with the pseudonym Gummatei.
He was also highly skilled in the painting called kioku-ye, fantasy painting, done with objects or tableware dipped in Indian ink, such as boxes used as measuring cups, eggs, or bottles. He also painted admirably well with his left hand, or even from bottom to top. Those of his paintings done with his fingernails are especially surprising and if one did not see the artist at work, one would think them done with brushes.
His work had the good fortune not only of exciting the admiration of his fellow painters, but also of attracting the masses because of its special novelty. His productions were highly sought-after by foreigners and there was even a year in which his drawings and woodcuts were exported by the hundreds, but almost as suddenly, the Tokugawa government banned this export.
An anecdote attests to this fame. In fact, at the end of the 18th century, Hokusai’s talent not only made him popular with his compatriots, but he was also appreciated by the Dutch. One of them, believed to be Captain Isbert Hemmel, had the intelligent idea of bringing back to Europe two scrolls done by the illustrious master’s brush. They represent, in the first, all the stages in the life of a Japanese man from birth to death, and in the second, all the stages in the life of a Japanese woman. Hokusai received, from a Dutch doctor, an order for two scrolls and for two more for the captain.
An Oiran and Her Two Shinzō Admiring the Cherry
Trees in Bloom in Nakanocho, c. 1796-1800.
Double-length surimono, nishiki-e
(polychrome woodblock print), 47.8 x 65 cm.
Musée national des Arts asiatiques – Guimet, Paris.
Spring at Enoshima (Enoshima shunbō), from the series
The Threads of the Willow (Yanagi no ito), 1797.
Nishiki-e (polychrome woodblock print),
24.9 x 38 cm (ōban). British Museum, London.
A Mountainous Landscape with a Bridge, c. 1799.
Surimono, nishiki-e (polychrome woodblock print),
12.6 x 17.1 cm. Matthi Forrer Collection.
Asters and Susuki Grass, c. 1805.
Double-length surimono, nishiki-e
(polychrome woodblock print), 41.1 x 55.8 cm.
Chester Beatty Library, Dublin.
Women on a Veranda Stretching Cloth to Dry, c. 1799.
Surimono, nishiki-e (polychrome woodblock print),
23.4 x 35.2 cm. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.
The price, agreed upon between the buyers and the artist, was 150 ryōs in gold (the gold ryō being worth one pound sterling). Hokusai brought all his care and technical knowledge to the creation of these four scrolls. They were completed by the time of departure of the Dutchmen. When he delivered the scrolls, the captain, enchanted, gave him the agreed price, but the doctor, on the pretext that he was not treated as well as the captain, only wanted to pay half of the price. Hokusai refused to accept this.
However, the sum that the painter should have earned was already slated to pay off some debts and Hokusai’s wife scolded him for not having given one scroll to the doctor, since that sum would have saved them from deep poverty. Hokusai let his wife speak and, after a long silence, told her that he had no illusions about the poverty that awaited them, but he would not stand for the greed of a stranger who treated them with so little respect, adding: “I prefer poverty to having someone walk all over me.” The captain, when he heard of the doctor’s behaviour, sent his interpreter with the money and bought the two scrolls ordered by the doctor. Hokusai continued to sell some of his drawings to the Dutch, until he was banned from selling details of the intimate lives of the Japanese people to foreigners.
The 300 ryōs in gold paid to Hokusai by Dutch Captain Isbert Hemmel, for the four makimonos on Japanese life, was certainly the largest payment the painter had ever obtained for his works. In fact, his book illustrations – the artist’s principal revenue – were poorly remunerated by editors, even at the time when the artist enjoyed his greatest celebrity.
One can take as evidence this fragment from a letter sent from Uraga in 1836 to the editor, Kobayashi: “I am sending you three and a half pages of “Poetry of the Tang Epoch”. Of the forty-two mommes [one ryō is equal to sixty mommes] that I have earned, keep one-and-a-half mommes that I owe you; please give the rest, forty and one half mommes, to the courier.”
This story also shows the great poverty in which the artist lived, even into his old age. Thus, we also know that Hokusai borrowed miserable sums to pay for his daily needs from fruit sellers and fishmongers, and see the request the painter made of an editor to borrow one ryō, pleading with him to pay this meagre amount in the smallest change possible in order to pay his petty debts to his neighbourhood merchants.
Three Ladies in a Boat, from the kyōka album
The Elegance of Spring (Haru no miyabi), c. 1797.
Nishiki-e (polychrome woodblock print),
16.7 x 39.2 cm. Peter Morse Collection.
The Semi-Legendary Hero, Asahina Saburō, c. 1797.
Nishiki-e (polychrome woodblock print),
10.4 x 18.5 cm (koban). Gerhard Pulverer Collection,
Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, D.C.
Fuji, from Four Famous Names (Shisho no uchi), c. 1822.
Nishiki-e (polychrome woodblock print), 20.9 x 18.4 cm.
Gerhard Pulverer Collection, Freer Gallery of Art,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Also attesting to this poverty is another letter in which Hokusai complains of having only one robe to keep his seventy-six-year-old body warm during a harsh winter. The artist lived all his life in deep poverty because of the low prices paid in Japan by editors to artists, because of his independent spirit, in the name of which he would only accept work that he liked, and also because of the debts that he had to pay for his son, Tominosuke, and for his grandson by his daughter Omiyo. Moreover, he had a certain vanity about his poverty.
In 1834, Hokusai sent the following letter to his three editors, Kobayashi, Hanabusa, and Kakumaruya: “As I am travelling, I do not have the time to write to you individually, and am sending to the three of you this one letter that I hope you will all read in turn. I do not doubt that you would like to grant an old man the requests that he makes of you, and I hope that your families are all doing well. As for your old man, he is still the same, the strength of his brush continues to build, and to, more than ever, exercise care. When he is one hundred years old, he will become one of the true artists.”
The old painter signed at length, “old Hokusai, the crazy old artist, the beggar priest,” but his letter is, in so many words, entirely in this postscript: “For the book of ‘Warriors’ [undoubtedly Ehon Sakigake, ‘The Heroes of China and Japan’, printed and engraved by Yegawa], I hope that the three of you will give it to Yegawa Tomekiti. As for the price, arrange that directly with him. The reason I am adamant that the woodcuts be by Yegawa is that, whilst both the Hokusai Manga and the ‘Poetry’ are certainly two well-engraved works, they are far from the perfection of the three volumes of ‘Mount Fuji’ that he engraved. Now, if my drawings are cut by a good engraver, that will encourage me to work, and if the book is a success, that is also to our advantage because it will bring you greater profit. Do not think that it is to earn a commission that I recommend Yegawa to you so highly; what I seek is clean execution, and that would be a satisfaction you could give to a poor old man who has not much farther to go [here the painter drew himself, as an old man walking, supported by two brushes instead of crutches]. As for The Life of Çakyamouni [Shakuson Ilidaïki Zuye, an illustrated novel published in 1839], Souzanbô promised me to have it engraved by Yegawa, and I drew it based on this choice: the curly hair of the Indians being very difficult to engrave, even the forms of the bodies, and there is absolutely no one but Yegawa who can execute this work. Hanabusa, after his visit some time ago, told me, when he ordered the ‘Warriors’ from me, that he would not leave me unoccupied and I remind him of his good word.
Longing for My Hometown (Kaikokyō), 1798-1810.
Surimono, nishiki-e (polychrome woodblock print),
57.2 x 76.2 cm (nagaban). Clarence Buckingham Collection,
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.
Girls Picking Blossoms, c. 1796.
Surimono, nishiki-e (polychrome woodblock print),
19 x 36.1 cm. Chester Beatty Library, Dublin.
Three Ladies by a Well, c. 1795-1796.
Surimono, nishiki-e (polychrome woodblock print),
19 x 35.7 cm. Chester Beatty Library, Dublin.
A Mare and Her Foal, 1795-1798.
Nishiki-e (polychrome woodblock print),
35.5 x 24 cm (aiban).
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
“You ordered from my daughter an illustration of the ‘Hundred Poets’, but I would rather illustrate this book, which I will undertake myself after having finished the ‘Warriors’. As for the price, we will come to an agreement, as for a poet. But however, can we agree in advance that it will be Yegawa who will engrave the book?” The letter ends with a sketch in which he salutes his editors.
Another letter from Hokusai was sent to the editor Kobayashi, dated 1835: “I did not ask about you, but I am happy to know that you are in good health. As for myself, I saw the delinquent, the incorrigible who will always fall back on me. Since then, I have had to ask for the advice of friends and family.
“Finally, I found a respondent [someone who would take responsibility for watching over him]. We will make him manage a fish store, and we have also found him a wife who will arrive here in two or three days. But all that is still at my expense. It is due to these obstacles that I am behind in illustrating the Suikoden and Toshisen [Tang poetry], for which I have only started the sketches. I will, however, send you some drawings and in that case, I am counting on…” Here, the painter drew a hand holding a silver coin.