This book contains more than 350 masterworks of artists such as Hiroshite, Utamaro, Harunobu, Eisen and Hokusai, all from the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum

150 full-colour illustrations

Katsushika Hokusai is without a doubt the most famous Japanese artist known in the Western world since the middle of the nineteenth century.
Reflecting the artistic expression of an isolated civilisation, the works of Hokusai, one of the first Japanese artists to emerge in Europe, greatly influenced Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters, such as Vincent van Gogh.
Considered a Ukiyo-e master even during his lifetime, Hokusai fascinates us with the variety and the significance of his work which spanned almost ninety years and is presented here in all its breadth and diversity.

About the author
Friend of Émile Zola, Gustave Flaubert and Alphonse Daudet, Edmond de Goncourt was a French writer belonging to the naturalist movement. Eyewitness to the events of the worldly and artistic life of the second half of the nineteenth century, his major work remains the Journal written with his brother, Jules. Beginning in 1850, they collaborated on history books, most notably treating painting, such as Eighteenth Century Art. Impassioned by the delicate beauty of the Japanese woodblock prints, Edmond de Goncourt became, through his monographs on Utamaro and Hokusai, one of the first to reveal the magnificence of this art to the Western world.

This big and beautiful book presents a comprehensive survey of the work of one of Japan’s greatest and most influential artists, together with a collection of essays that focus on a key aspects of the master’s career. The book opens with an introductory essay by Gian Carlo Calza presenting an overview of the changing world Hokusai was born into and lived through. This is followed by a series of essays by distinguished Western and Japanese scholars that present new research on a range of crucial areas of interest in Hokusai studies. These form a context for the core of the book, which forms a retrospective of Hokusai’s entire career, divided into seven chapters. Each chapter provides a succinct account of a phase in Hokusai’s life, followed by a series of the finest and most representative works of that period. Great care has been taken throughout to choose for reproduction the best-preserved original prints that reveal Hokusai’s mastery of line and colour to full advantage. This magnificent pictorial survey of Hokusai’s prints, paintings and drawings is the first publication in English to make such a rich selection widely available, and to demonstrate the extraordinary range and quality of Hokusai’s achievement. The final component of the book is a detailed scholarly commentary on each illustration that provides not only the necessary technical information but also a revealing analysis of style, colour, composition and motif.