A series of sketches by one of Japan’s greatest artists–created during a very different kind of lockdown–are going on show at the British Museum.
The drawings by Hokusai, famous for his image The Great Wave, were created in around 1840 during the rule of the Tokugawa shoguns who banned foreign travel and tried to restrict the influence of the outside world but range from the birth of Buddhism in India to the rise of civilisation in China.
The 103 postcard sized drawings are thought to have been in a private collection for decades before they surfaced in Paris in 2019 and were part of a project Hokusai called The Great Picture Book of Everything.
Plans for the book were abandoned but the pictures survived and will go show in an exhibition that will also include two prints of The Great Wave.
Curator Alfred Haft said: “Katsushika Hokusai’s brush-drawings for The Great Picture Book of Everything burst with energy. As the artist himself hoped, each dot and each line almost seems to have a life of its own. This remarkable rediscovery will speak to anyone who loves Japanese art or simply the art of drawing.”
Thousands of copies of The Great Wave were printed in the 1830s but only a few hundred survive.
The print, which shows a storm at sea off Kanagawa near Tokyo, has been widely recreated in popular culture. The museum showed one of its copies in an exhibition several years ago when it was displayed under special low lighting to stop the colours fading
