Artist Biography

Katsushika Hokusai

1760 – 1849

Katsushika Hokusai (葛飾 北斎; c. 31 October 1760 – 10 May 1849) was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist of the Edo period, active as a painter and printmaker. He is the most internationally renowned Japanese artist in history and the creator of Under the Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki nami ura, commonly called The Great Wave) — arguably the single most recognizable image in the entire history of Japanese art and one of the most reproduced images in human visual culture. Yet his achievement extends far beyond this single iconic print to encompass one of the most prodigiously productive and formally varied careers in the history of world art: over his seven-decade career he produced more than 30,000 artworks across every genre available to a Japanese artist of the Edo period, from intimate surimono private-commission prints to monumental festival paintings, from erotic shunga prints to devotional Buddhist imagery, from kabuki actor portraits to ghost story illustrations.