Japan, 1760–1849

Katsushika Hokusai

Hokusai worked across seventy years and reportedly changed his professional name more than thirty times. The landscape prints that made him famous outside Japan came late — he was past seventy when the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji series appeared.

The prints are woodblock: each colour is a separately carved block, printed in register onto paper. What looks like a single image is a stack of impressions.