Over the course of his long career – he was a master draughtsman at 12 – the Japanese genius Hokusai (1760-1849) was so prolific it seems absurd that the west knows him mainly for a single work, The Great Wave. His many thousands of images were treasured throughout Japan. For sale as cheap prints – the Wave originally cost no more than a double serving of noodles – and in bestselling volumes in city bookshops, they reached every corner of the nation through travelling libraries.
One of these volumes was to be an encyclopedia, with the flamboyant title The Great Picture Book of Everything. But for some unknown reason the book was never published. Hokusai made 103 drawings for it, known to scholars but out of sight in the private collection of a French jeweller until his death in 1942. Whereupon they disappeared, all but forgotten until 2019, when Timothy Clark of the British Museum heard word of them at an auction and managed to secure them for the nation. This magnificent exhibition, jammed since it opened earlier this autumn, is the first time they have ever been shown in public.
The first thing you see is the box in which these fragile drawings were preserved: a tiny house for such greatness. But the proportions are exact, for these drawings are no bigger than postcards. Black and white, in pen and ink, each is so densely detailed as to be encyclopedic in itself. Hokusai can’t draw so much as a cat without including an exquisitely detailed branch of hibiscus, then adding another cat for a bristling encounter. His drawing of a camel incorporates an orangutan crouched intently on its back, a shrewd black fox and a raccoon-dog flying off into the white space that remains. The world is both real and mythical.
It is possible that Hokusai encountered a camel, and his image is charmingly accurate. But Japanese people were not allowed to travel, in his day, passing their whole lives in national lockdown. Like Dürer before him, Hokusai drew a rhinoceros without ever having seen one, but his is an appealingly antic critter with three horns, fur and a curious tortoise-shell lid. The encyclopedia was to be for children as well as adults.
India and China were among its themes. Hokusai’s drawing of an Indian holy man is almost a mirror of his Japanese equal, but with rather less hair, both of them sashaying like elegant geishas. He drew a Mongolian warrior with a mild and weary wisdom in his ageing face – always such humane insights – and a Siamese traveller meticulously examining a length of fluttering silk. Whatever the foreigners of other nations might have looked like, they always acquire delicacy, wit and beauty through the art of Hokusai.
There are many myths of origin. Three men brew the very first rice wine, with a Heath Robinson contraption involving pumps, presses and cantilevered poles upon which they balance to comical effect. Paper is invented by the Japanese, in a long vat of mulch; then the printing press; and then, fittingly, the fine black ink with which all three advances are depicted on this single sheet. This is all clear and precise, no matter how fanciful.
Elsewhere you need the title (inscribed in Japanese on each drawing) to grasp what is going on in certain scenes. Two smiling men brandish what appear to be fizzing fireworks on long sticks in a rainstorm. This is the title: “Using the marrow of a red leopard, the Emperor Wu designed torches that remained lit even in torrential rain.”
Radical, revolutionary, dynamic: Hokusai’s graphic notations startle every time. Rain strafes the page in needle-fine lines, sometimes crisscrossing, sometimes broken, its arrival upon some invisible surface described in a spatter of dots. Lightning flashes outwards in white spokes from a central disc, always blank, that reads like the moment of a nuclear explosion. Eyes are a staggering grammar of commas, hyphens, cedillas and full stops, minutely inflected to describe each individual face.
Nature is stunningly personified. Waterfalls surge both upwards and downwards, their bubbles like foaming cherry blossom. Clouds are formed like rocks, in turn like blossom, in turn like frothing brine. You see presages of the famous wave everywhere (it was yet to come), flexing its pictorial claws, scattering foam that resembles snowfall, thickets of leaves and even a legendary Chinese rock in one dragon-slaying melodrama.
Hokusai’s sense of humour is everywhere apparent, particularly in games of hide-and-seek for the eye. Spot the big bear under this waterfall (made up of miniature great waves). Find the moon among the shifting branches. A massive yet gentle elephant is tenderly cared for by two young attendants, but one of them is half-hidden behind the behemoth’s sheer bulk.
Hokusai was almost 70 when he proposed this project to his publishers. He had suffered a stroke, the death of two wives, poverty and the intransigence of his grandson, whose debts he was forced to pay. Destitution beckoned. Yet even under these circumstances his vision never fails (nor his eyesight) and his imagination soars. The most beautiful image here shows a Taoist master ascending a ladder of clouds to pluck a pale moon from the twilight sky. It might be an emblematic self-portrait.
Hokusai’s drawings are extremely rare. The creation of his woodcuts required the sacrifice of his drawings. The page would be laid over a wooden block; the carver would cut directly through the lines; the original image was thus destroyed. Sad as it is to think that The Great Picture Book of Everything was never published, and that Hokusai made no money, it is less of a loss when you consider the drawings reprieved before us now, revealing his first thoughts and gestures, in this captivating show.
Hokusai: The Great Picture Book of Everything is at the British Museum, London, until 30 January 2022
