The crowning glory of the popular Japanese school was Hokusai, “The
old man mad about painting,” who wrote of himself, in a preface to his
“Hundred Views of Fuji”:
At seventy-five I have learned a little about the real structure
of nature--of animals, plants and trees, birds, fishes and
insects. In consequence, when I am eighty, I shall have made
still more progress. At ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of
things; at a hundred I shall certainly have reached a marvelous
stage, and when I am a hundred and ten, everything I do--be it
but a line or dot--will be alive. I beg those who live as long
as I do to see if I do not keep my word.
Hokusai died in 1849, at the age of eighty-nine, his work revealing
a continual increase in power to the last. Of his work, Mrs. Amsden
writes:
His fecundity was marvelous. He illustrated books of all
kinds, poetry, comic albums, accounts of travels--in fact,
his works are an encyclopedia of Japanese life. His paintings
are scattered, and countless numbers lost, many being merely
ephemeral drawings, thrown off for the passing pleasure of the
populace.
On his death-bed Hokusai murmured, “If heaven had but granted me five
more years I could have been a repainter.”--DORA AMSDEN,
“Impressions of Ukiyo-ye.”
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