Masters of Art - Katsushika Hokusai

by Katsushika Hokusai

  So little is known about the sets and “states” of Hokusai’s large colour-prints, that it is impossible to treat them with exact bibliographical detail. A series of five upright sheets, combining into a big, curious picture of the interior of a maison verte, is the first of these with which I am acquainted, though sheets from still earlier books were apparently printed and sold separately. From the style, it would seem that the Maison Verte was published between 1800 and 1810. It was not till fifteen years later that the great series of the Thirty-six Views of Vuji (1823-1829), the Bridges (1827-1830), the Waterfalls (circa 1827), the Hundred Poems {circa 1830), and the Flowers, were designed, so that these represent Hokusai’s powers at their maturity. Considerations of subject-matter interfere with the artistic merit of some of the Bridges. The Hundred Poems are not only rare, but very unequal. The Thirty-six Views, while they contain some astonishing plates, such as “The Wave” (PL XII.), the red mountain in a storm (Pl. XI.), and the red mountain rising into a blue sky barred with cirrus cloud, do not really maintain such a high average as the Waterfalls (Pl. XIV.). In spite of much obvious convention, and a colouring which in more than one case is powerful rather than harmonious, the Waterfalls have, as a set (eight plates as known), a sustained magnificence that even the volumes of the Gwafu cannot parallel. If the one plate of the Flowers at South Kensington is a fair sample of the series (Pl. IX.), the fact that it appears to be an unique specimen is little short of a calamity, for in colour as well as in design the bunch of chrysanthemums could hardly be more nobly treated.

  There are a good many original drawings by Hokusai in Europe and America, but, as almost all of them are in private hands, their study needs a certain amount of time and good luck. Drawings made before 1810 seem to be exceedingly rare; for out of more than three hundred sketches which the writer has had the opportunity of seeing, there was not one which could belong to a period antecedent to the Mangwa. The sketches may be divided into two classes — drawings made for sale or display, and drawings which were studies for engraved designs. As any one acquainted with the circumstances of Hokusai’s life can guess, the first class contains many sketches that are merely exhibitions of manual dexterity, without real importance. Now and then, however, there occur compositions of the utmost majesty, as in the drawing (sold in the Brinkley Collection) of two snow-clad peaks rising out of a sea of mist. The studies for engraved designs are much more interesting, but hardly the kind of thing we should expect. One imagines Hokusai’s sketches to be vivid, hasty records of instantaneous impressions, rough, perhaps, but full of energy and dash. This is only the case now and then. Hokusai’s methods seem to have been as deliberate as his success was complete. Again and again one comes across big studies for the little figures in the Mangwa and the Gwafu, drawn from the first with extraordinary delicacy and finish, a preliminary sketch in red often underlying the decisive work in black, but ruled across for accurate reduction, so that there may be no chance of error (Pls.VII. and VIII.). Those acquainted with fine wood-engraving know how much it may improve even good drawing, — how few of even Millais’s drawings have the exquisite quality of the Dalziel cuts! — and the Japanese engravers were as skilful in their own way as Altdorfer or Liitzelberger; yet when one sees Hokusai’s drawings, one cannot help feeling that the engraving was really a failure, so vast is the difference between the sketches and the prints. Curiously enough, sketches for complete compositions are very rare; the studies are nearly always studies of single figures. Possibly these were only combined when drawn on to the tissue paper which was pasted on to the block, so that the original design of the whole composition was destroyed in the cutting.

  A word on the current prices of Hokusai’s work may not be out of place. The drawings are practically unattainable; but as the demand for them is at present small and uncertain, individual sketches, when they come into the market, do not usually fetch more than two or three guineas, that is to say, about the price of a fair print from the Thirty-six Views. Colour-prints or drawings of exceptional merit or scarcity may, of course, cost more. The books vary a good deal in price. When they are not printed in colours, from half a crown to ten shillings a volume, according to state, and the knowledge and nationality of the dealer, may be taken as a fair average. No price can be laid down for books of prints in colour, but if the prints are old and in good condition, a shilling a page is not unreasonable for small works. The volumes of designs for artisans have no commercial value.

  Hokusai changed his signature so often that a note as to his principal noms de pinceau will be useful to those who wish to identify or to date his prints. These names were sometimes used alone, sometimes in combination. The signature on the prints designed when he was a pupil of Shunsho is Shunrô. In 1795 he signs Sori, and in 1796 takes the name of Hokusai (northern studio). In 1800 he adds Gwakiojin (mad about drawing) to this name, and also Tokimasa, the signature of two of the Yedo books above mentioned. In 1807 and the following years he uses the name Katsushika; in 1816, Tai’to; in 1820 he changes again to the name which may be read as Iitsu or Tamekadzu. From 1835 onwards he signs Manrojin or Gwakio Rojin Manji [the old man mad about drawing]. The chief of these signatures, together with those of Hokusai’s best pupils, Hokuba and Hokkei, have been reproduced as an aid to identification, and will be found opposite Plate I.

  HOKUSAI — THE PAINTER OF LIFE

  As the short summary of the contents of the Mangwa given in the previous chapter enables us to form some idea of the scope of Hokusai’s studies, so the preface to the series shows us very clearly the spirit in which’ those studies were undertaken. “Art alone can perpetuate the living reality of the things of this world, and the only art capable of such well-doing is the true art that abides in the kingdom of genius. The rare talent of the master Hokusai is well known throughout the country. This autumn, by chance, in his journey westward, he visited our town (Nagoya), and made the acquaintance of Boksenn... under whose roof he dreamed and drew some three hundred compositions. The things of heaven and of Buddha, the life of men and women, even birds and beasts, plants and trees, he has included them all; and under his brush every phase and form of existence has arisen. For some time past the talent of our artists seemed to be on the wane; life and movement were lacking in their work; their hand seemed powerless to render their thought. But in the varied sketches here presented, how admirable are the sincerity and force! The master has tried to give life to everything he has painted; the joy and happiness so faithfully expressed in his work are a plain proof of his victory.”

  In a few words it would hardly be possible to give a better idea of Hokusai’s peculiar achievement. “The things of heaven and of Buddha” alone have been enough to occupy many great painters of the East and West for a lifetime. Though naturally based on the work of his predecessors, the religious designs of Hokusai present one or two marked variations from the current artistic tradition. The masters of the Kano and Buddhist schools, if not aristocrats themselves, lived with the aristocracy and regarded their art as a kind of ritual, consecrated and governed by an immemorial usage, as strict in its limitation of saintly actions and attributes as was the Spanish Inquisition. In the hands of the earlier men by whom the formulae were first defined, the artistic impulse retained something of the freshness of youth; but in the course of several centuries of imitation, religious painting had become a thing of use and wont like the faith it embodied, and lived only by the light reflected from its past history. It had ceased to be in sympathy with popular opinion, for its conventional deities remained in a conventional heaven very far away from the realities of human existence. The Japanese, always attracted by the sensuous side of things, joined in either Buddhist or Shinto ceremonies as the taste of the moment prompted, and regarded all gods alike with a feeling of easy companionship. Hokusai was the first to give effect to this sentiment in art; indeed, in his determination to mark the links that join the immortals with mortal men, he is not afraid of caricature. The fat Hotei was half human
even with the strictest of the old masters; but they never revelled in the extravagant inflation of his paunch that delighted their less reverent junior. At the same time, Hokusai was the first to make goddesses really beautiful by blending with their traditional attributes the grace and suavity of the living women around him (Pl. XVIII.). His gods, in fact, are gods of the people, who have put off their austerity and remoteness to become real and familiar comrades.

  Monsters, ghosts, and demons are treated in the same spirit. They remain superhuman because it is the essence of their nature, but they are no longer misty and indefinite, or even invincible. Hokusai’s dragons, for instance, are drawn with a detail of scale and claw and spine that makes their plunge from a whirl of storm-cloud seem quite a possibility. So the gigantic spider with the horrible appendages of a cuttle-fish, the fox with nine floating waving tails, the giants, and the demons are described with a nicety that, if it makes their terror less vague, makes it at the same time more actual. Yet, lest we should be frightened too much, the monsters are generally represented as getting the worst of it in their meetings with mortal heroes. The dragon drinks the nine fatal cups of saké, the spider is slain by the glaive of Hiraïno-Hôsho, the thunder demon kneels in terror before the prodigious infant Kintoki. An exception must be made in the case of the ghosts. Hokusai’s phantoms are usually very unpleasant. Even the caprices of Leonardo, Breughel, or Goya never invented anything as ghastly as the apparition of the murdered wife in the tenth Mangwa; that monstrous, mutilated, idiot embryo, whose claw-like hands and single glaring eye are eloquent of irresponsible ferocity (Pl. VI.). Had the artist been cursed with the bitterness of a Salvator, he evidently could have done work of a kind it is not comfortable to think about. Fortunately Hokusai bore the world no grudge, and did not always draw ghosts.

  His manner changes when he has to deal with the national heroes of China and of his own country. The grace and fluency which characterise his sketches of contemporary subjects are replaced by the decisive angularity that marks the finest Chinese naturalism, though its calm grandeur is entirely absent. Hokusai tells us the reason in one of his prefaces: “I find that in all Japanese and Chinese representations of war the force and movement which should be their essential feature are lacking. Regretting this defect, I am on fire to remedy it, and supply what was wanting.” Thus it is that we see these whiskered Mongols in Japanese mail, whirled across the pages of the hero books in involved, nay extravagant, attitudes, that they may really seem to be in earnest about their sanguinary work (Pl. XX.). As before noted, the original sketches are more pleasant in effect than the prints (cf. Pls. XIX. and XX.), for the engraver has taken every opportunity of making the plates livelier than ever by black spots and masses, where the sketch is all delicate brown or grey.

  The accusation of conventionalism or absurdity which might reasonably be brought against the prints of heroes, if the compositions were not so majestic, the execution so perfect, and the vigour of the movements so fresh and so unusual in a century that has apparently forgotten Rubens, fails absolutely when Hokusai comes to draw the men and women about him. His touch smooth, undisturbed, unerring, includes in its easy sweep men, women, and children in every stage of motion or rest; noting affectionately those instinctive, momentary gestures which make action natural. With the stiff ceremonials of the court he has no sympathy, but never tires of drawing the people among whom he lived, the artisans, the shopkeepers, and country folk in all their varied amusements and employments. Actors alone he avoids. The sets of the Forty-seven Ronins are of course exceptions, but they are works of his early manhood, when perhaps a certain pride in his ancestry may have caused him to regard that one legend as something apart from the ordinary theatrical world that was so popular with his contemporaries. The humanity he really loves is for the most part a busy humanity. We see it passing briskly along the great high-roads, alert both for the incidents, the humours, and the accidents of a long journey, travelling steadily through rain and fine weather (Pl. XVI.), crossing over the drum-shaped bridges (Pls.I. and XIII.), or crammed into a ferry boat where the stream is broad or deep, wading where it is shallow (Pl. XVII.). The junks are filled with seething masses of sailors, every street view has its appropriate body of promenaders, even where we should naturally expect nothing of the kind, men are introduced, as in that winter landscape (Pl. V.), where a great army with lances and banners winds up a mountain pass; or in the picture of the great elephant, over whom his attendants are clambering while others below are rubbing him down with brushes attached to long poles.

  Yet it is after all with the artisan class among whom he lived that Hokusai’s sympathy is keenest. He knew by heart not only the figures of the workers and the action of their limbs, but the whole circumstance of their business and private lives, from the machines they work to their kitchen utensils. Volume viii of the Mangwa, for instance, may not be particularly exciting from an artist’s point of view, but a glance at it will show how thoroughly the designer was master of the details of weaving and the action of a loom. Hokusai had, in fact, the whole life of the lower class Japanese literally, at his finger tips. His attitude towards them is not that of a Millet, — for the Japanese are a cheerful race, to whom their daily toil brings no sadness, — but rather that of a Rubens, with the humour of a Daumier, and something of the feminine insight of a Watteau. He knows how men are convulsed by violent exertion, he feels the rhythmic swing of their bodies; he knows the graceful bearing of the Japanese woman, the sweeping curves of her dress, the delicate fulness of her neck and limbs; he knows how children claw and crawl and waddle. Yet more than all, he knows that every motion and almost every attitude of rest has its ridiculous side; and it is this side that appeals to him. Can anything be at once more pathetic and yet more humorous than the noble composition of blind men struggling in a stream from the Gwafu (Pl. XVII.), where we hardly know whether to pity their helplessness or laugh at the comicality of their gestures. Nevertheless, of all painters of mirth he is the one who is least dependent upon caricature. He can of course caricature perfectly, but his mirth is too genuinely artistic, his skill of hand too perfect, his eye too accurate for exaggeration to have a permanent place in his design. His contemporaries and his pupils make their countrymen too delicately graceful or too absurdly grotesque. Hokusai alone has been able to keep the middle course, and render their comeliness and gaiety with that temperate emphasis that makes them real and living.

  In animals he is quick to note character. All his beasts are full of it, from the rat (in the print room of the British Museum) nibbling the pepperpod to the furious tiger carried down the waterfall (Mangwa, xiii.), or the great kindly elephant. But more than all, he loves their wildness. Birds, reptiles, fishes, and quadrupeds alike cease in his hands to be the stuffed figures which even the mighty Durer or the delicate Pisanello were content to draw, but are “imperturbe, standing at ease with nature.” His shaggy ponies kick and prance, his puppies sprawl, his birds scream and flirt and tumble and peck, his carp whirl in graceful curves, his dories plod along with great vacant eyes that contrast strongly with the fierce glance of some great sea marauder or the deadly fixed glare of the cuttlefish (Pl. II.). He has a special love for crabs, with their scrambling walk, their neatly-jointed plate-armour, and the double-page plate devoted to them in the Gwafu is one of his most successful designs. He is no scientific anatomist, he has an eye only for the outside of things, and yet he can invent animals that really seem alive. Witness the tiger among the pine needles and the curious studies, two out of several large drawings, for it (Pls.VII. and VIII.). He had to invent his tiger, since that animal is unknown in Japan. And those who are acquainted with the tiger of Japanese tradition — that inflated tabby who never manages to look fierce — will understand how little help could come from that quarter.

  He is equally at home with trees and plants. His drawings of leaves and flowers and stems in detail is as perfect as it can be (e.g. the grasses in PI. XVI.); but in the treatment of m
asses of foliage he is hindered by the national custom of doing without shadow, and so his foliage in bulk becomes frankly conventional. Occasionally the convention is not a happy one. Even in careful and elaborate compositions he sometimes fails to attain that last perfection of repose which marks the noblest aft, through the obtrusiveness of some too lightly suggested bough, whose scraggy proportions irritate our scientific eyes. His love of flowers differs from that of Korin or Utamaro in a preference for broadness of mass rather than the delicacy of detail, though he can work carefully enough if he chooses (PL IX.). He feels the spring of a bough when a bird alights upon it, or the play of curves among the blades of wind-ruffled grass. Rocks alone seem to drive him to extravagance or to the formulae of the Chinese artists who had preceded him by a thousand years. Nevertheless, his crags, if usually impossible in structure, are imposing in mass; and the comparative failure may perhaps be explained by the amorphous nature of the volcanic rocks of which the Japanese islands are in the main composed. The stones in Mangwa ii are very evidently slaty crystallines of some sort, just as the cleavage of the long slab jutting into the sea in Mangwa vii is quite sufficiently indicated.

  His attitude is always that of the painter of aspect rather than the painter of analysis. Hence, when Hokusai deals with the nude in violent action, as in some of his large figures of wrestlers, his indication of straining muscles is not the sort of thing that would pass muster in the Academy schools; yet where he has actual experience to go upon, where he is uninfluenced by the mannerisms either of China or of his Japanese predecessors and contemporaries, the result is very different. Take, for instance, the picture of a windy day (Pl. XVL), from the Gwafu, and note how the supple flesh of the girl’s arms and ankles is indicated by the single sweeping line, that marks with equal accuracy and directness the masculine toughness of the next figure, and the chubby contours of the child. In drawing the man’s leg he has room for no more than a line to indicate the fold by the knee-cap and another for the hollow at the side of the soleus muscle, yet the limb is perfectly rendered. If this were an isolated instance one would perhaps have little right to base any claim for general recognition upon it; but when, in looking over Hokusai’s mature work, one finds evidence everywhere of the same simplicity and directness, it is impossible to deny the evidence of one’s eyes and not to recognise one of the world’s greatest draughtsmen. Remembering the artist’s own prophecy—” When I am a hundred and ten everything I do, be it but a dot or a line, will be alive” — the statement, in the light of Hokusai’s actual achievement, is over modest, for within the limits of his materials and methods he seems to have anticipated the period of perfection by about fifty years.