“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-five I have learned a little about the real structure of nature,—of animals, plants and 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 line or dot—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,—today Gwakio-rojin, ‘the old man, mad about drawing.’”
RS longa, vita brevis,” though a time-worn aphorism, seems the best comment upon these words of Hokusai, which preface the “Fugaku Hiak’kei” (Hundred Views of Fuji). Judging from what he had accomplished, before his death in 1849, at the age of eighty-nine, and the continual increase in his powers, it is easy to believe that had his life been extended to the limit he craved, the prophecy would have been fulfilled.
M. Louis Gonse says of Hokusai, “He is the last and most brilliant figure of a progress of more than ten centuries—the exuberant and exquisite product of a time of profound peace and incomparable refinement.”
From the standpoint of Buddhism, Hokusai was the crowning glory, the supreme efflorescence of countless previous incarnations. In his career he epitomized the theory of evolution, the embryonic stages being exemplified by his progress through the schools. Trained in the atelier of Shunsho, the most skillful exponent of Ukiyo-ye art, he rapidly absorbed the methods of his master; but even the Popular School was trammelled by convention, and Hokusai’s genius, rejecting academic fetters, winged its flight through all the realms of oriental art.
He drank at the fountain-head of China, then absorbed the traditions of the “two great streams of Kano and Tosa, which flowed without mixing to the middle of the eighteenth century.” Kano, springing from Chinese models, was transformed by the genius of Masanobu and his followers, and became the most illustrious school of painting in Japan. It was the official school of the Shoguns, in opposition to “Tosa”—that elegant and exquisite appanage of the Mikados, which represented aristocratic taste.
The Tosa school is characterized by extreme delicacy of execution and fine use of the brush, as in Persian miniature painting. The splendour of the screens of Tosa has never been surpassed, with their precious harmonies in colour and delicate designs (so often imitated in lacquer), against glorious backgrounds in rich gold-leaf.
He studied the technique of Okio, founder of the school of realism, which, maturing at Kyoto, led up to “Ukiyo-ye,” the popular art of the masses of Yedo. Ukiyo-ye, literally “The Floating World,” despised by the ascetic disciples of Buddha and Confucius for picturing the gay world of fashion and folly, was the name of the school which liberated Japanese art from the shackles of centuries of tradition.
