Buying a Hokusai painted by his own hand

The printed Hokusai and the painted Hokusai

What carried the name of Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) around the world was the print: the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji above all. A print is a collaboration — the painter's drawing passes through the hands of the block-cutter and the printer, and some two hundred impressions of the first printing go out into the world. A painting is different: one sheet only, touched by Hokusai's own brush. The speed of the line, the depth of the ink, even the hesitation where the brush was changed, are all still there.

The gallery holds twenty such paintings, one of which is sold. They fall into three groups: twelve album leaves said to have been painted around 1836, five hanging-scroll works in six scrolls spanning his early period to his old age, and three fan paintings made between his late seventies and the age of eighty-three. To these we add three of the Thirty-six Views, reprinted under the colour supervision of the International Hokusai Society and mounted as hanging scrolls — twenty-three items that can be seen and acquired today.

What follows is a plate book in the same sequence as the booklet we hand out at the gallery. Each plate leads to that work's own page. All dimensions and materials are as recorded in the documentation we received with the works.

A title slip pasted to the album's cover records its origin: in the great famine of 1836 many lay fallen in the roads; at that time the aged Hokusai, then seventy-seven, conceived this album and by it barely kept himself fed. The slip speaks of Hokusai in the third person and ends with a phrase meaning “so it is said.” It is not in his own words; it was written later by someone into whose hands the album came. Who wrote it, and when, is not known. What is known is that these twelve leaves have come down together as one album, and that this account has come down with them.

These three are not paintings from Hokusai's brush. The designs are his, but the sheets were printed in our own time: the International Hokusai Society supervised the colour, the Edo woodblock studio Takahashi Kobo pulled the impressions by hand, and each was mounted as a hanging scroll. Because they are different in kind from the twenty works above, we do not count them among the paintings. How they were made is set out in a separate article.

On acquiring one of these

Every work here is unique. We give prices and a detailed condition report in reply to an enquiry. If you would like to see a work in person, say so and we will arrange it.