Katsushika Hokusai

Hokusai was born around 1760 in the Katsushika district of Edo, in a family of modest artisan standing. His parentage and the precise date of his birth are not firmly settled in the historical record; the traditional date, the 23rd day of the ninth month of Horeki 10, is often converted to late October 1760, but sources describe this conversion as speculative rather than certain.

He is reported to have worked at a bookshop and lending library as a boy, then to have apprenticed as a woodblock engraver in his early teens. Around age 18, roughly 1778, he entered the studio of Katsukawa Shunsho, head of the Katsukawa school, and trained there in ukiyo-e print design. After Shunsho's death in the early 1790s, Hokusai moved through other artistic circles and is said to have studied Western pictorial conventions drawn from Dutch copperplate prints around 1804. Across a career of nearly seventy years he worked under more than thirty different names, including the early name Shunro and, in his old age, Gakyo Rojin, "the old man mad about art." He produced an estimated 30,000 or more paintings, prints, drawings, and illustrations for close to 270 books. His best known work, the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, dates to about 1830 to 1832 and includes Under the Wave off Kanagawa.

Hokusai died on 10 May 1849 in Edo, at his house in the Asakusa district. Sources give his age at death as 88 in one major account and as 90 in another, reflecting the same underlying uncertainty about his exact birth date.

Institutional and critical opinion has treated Hokusai as a foundational figure in world art since the late nineteenth century, when the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston mounted an early Hokusai exhibition in 1892 to 1893. Writing in the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1985, the art historian Richard Lane concluded that Hokusai had, "since the later 19th century, impressed Western artists, critics and art lovers alike, more, possibly, than any other single Asian artist." The British Museum today calls him "one of Japan's best-loved and most inventive artists." That standing has been reinforced by a steady run of major museum exhibitions into the 2020s, including large surveys at the National Gallery of Victoria, the British Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

Hokusai's market centers on woodblock prints that survive in multiple impressions, so results depend heavily on the quality and rarity of a given impression rather than on the uniqueness of the object. The best-documented benchmark is an impression of The Great Wave that sold for HK$21,700,000 (about USD 2.8 million) at Sotheby's Hong Kong in November 2024, in the Masterpieces of Asian Art from the Okada Museum of Art sale; Sotheby's described the result as a new record for that print. It followed a confirmed benchmark of about USD 2.76 million for another Great Wave impression at Christie's New York on 21 March 2023, which Christie's described at the time as the highest price then paid for any Hokusai work at auction. Separately, a Hokusai painting, Beauty in Snow, with Inscription by Shokusanjin, is reported to have sold in Tokyo for about USD 4 million (JPY 621 million), described by one source as the highest price paid for a Hokusai painting; the auction house and exact date of that sale are not confirmed in available sources, so it is noted here rather than treated as a settled all-time record. Complete bound sets of the Thirty-six Views series have also traded in the low seven figures, but that market segment involves dozens of sheets sold together and is not directly comparable to a single-print record.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Hokusai, and given an output that likely exceeds 30,000 works across print, painting, and book illustration, there is unlikely to be one in the ordinary sense. Verification rests on connoisseurship: impression state, seals, paper, and documented provenance, assessed case by case by museum curators and the specialist departments of major auction houses. Because his most famous compositions exist in many surviving impressions, price is driven less by scarcity of the image and more by the condition and history of the specific sheet in front of a buyer. Collectors should also expect Hokusai's market to be shaped by museum programming rather than gallery activity: his profile rises and falls with major institutional exhibitions, which in turn feed demand for fine impressions of his best known series.