Katsushika Hokusai

Katsushika Hokusai is the most famous Japanese artist in the world, best known for The Great Wave off Kanagawa. But the woodblock prints that made him famous are only a fraction of his output. ArtGuess.io’s collection focuses on his paintings and brush drawings: gods of good fortune, birds, courtly figures and scenes of everyday life in Edo.

Life and Places

Hokusai was born in 1760 in the Katsushika district of Edo, the city we now call Tokyo. He trained as a woodblock carver and then in the studio of the print designer Katsushika Shunshō. Restless by nature, he is said to have moved house more than ninety times and used over thirty different art names.

Around 1800 he produced many privately commissioned prints and drawings of popular deities such as Ebisu, Daikoku and Benten, the patrons of merchants, wealth and the arts. His sketchbooks, the Hokusai Manga, began appearing in 1814. In the early 1830s, in his seventies, he created Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, and painted genre scenes such as A Merchant Making Up the Account (1833).

In his eighties he made several long stays in the mountain town of Obuse, in present-day Nagano, at the invitation of his patron Takai Kōzan. One of his very last works, Dragon Flying over Mount Fuji (1849), is held there today. He died in Edo in 1849, signing himself “the Old Man Mad About Painting.”

How to Recognize Katsushika Hokusai

• Confident line: Fluid, calligraphic ink outlines, often on paper or silk with little or no background.
• Japanese deities and customs: Laughing gods with fish, rice bales or mallets, New Year celebrations, kimono and tatami rooms.
• Edo is the default: Hokusai lived and worked almost entirely in Edo, so most of his works in the game are pinned to Tokyo.

Where Katsushika Hokusai Painted

The 19 works by Katsushika Hokusai in the ArtGuess.io database were made in these places:

Paintings by Katsushika Hokusai in the Game