Born October 31, 1760, Hokusai was irrefutably one of the most successful Japanese artists. His contribution to the diverse landscape of art includes some of the most iconic, recognizable and inspirational art prints.
Born October 31, 1760, Hokusai was irrefutably one of the most successful Japanese artists. His contribution to the diverse landscape of art includes some of the most iconic, recognizable and inspirational art prints.
October 31, 2025
Born October 31, 1760, Hokusai was irrefutably one of the most successful Japanese artists. His contribution to the diverse landscape of art includes some of the most iconic, recognizable and inspirational art prints.
"The Great Wave off Kanagawa" (c. 1831) is Hokusai’s most famous ukiyo-e woodblock print from the series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. Hokusai used the then-new Prussian blue to achieve deep, durable tones and layered gradients and he fused Japanese flat color with Western perspective to heighten drama. The print’s tight geometry, kinetic spray, and human-versus-nature tension make it both a snapshot of Edo-period coastal life and a universal emblem of awe that still circulates across posters, albums, fashion, and memes.
Over a 70-year career and more than 30 artistic pseudonyms, Hokusai pursued various art forms, including prints, toy making, board game design, illustration. He illustrated countless books of poetry and fiction, and even published his own how-to manuals for aspiring artists. One of these guides, titled Hokusai Manga, was filled with drawings of people, creatures, and gestures. This compilation of sketches served a visual handbook of motion and character that helped seed the modern idea of manga as a lively, sequential art.
His art was forged alongside a life both intense and turbulent. Widowhood, the loss of children, and financial strain shadowed periods of astonishing productivity. The animated feature Miss Hokusai (2015) dramatises this domestic world through the eyes of his gifted daughter, Katsushika O-Ei, suggesting how she assisted in the studio, navigated her own ambitions, and cared for a fragile half-sister. The film’s portrait of genius threaded with duty and neglect mirrors accounts of a household where art eclipsed comfort, yet family bonds, fractured and resilient by turns, remained part of Hokusai’s creative weather.
His influence radiated globally in the 19th century through Japonisme, his oeuvre quintessentially shaped the course of the Impressionist movement. Monet, Degas, and Van Gogh borrowed his flat planes and bold contours. Claude Monet was an enthusiast, he acquired 23 of the Hokusai’s prints. Designers, architects, and photographers still chase his trick: simplify the world until it feels more real.
The rapid embrace of his prints by European artists may have been in part due to his use of a Western-style vanishing point perspective. He chased new vantage points: low, high, oblique, and impossibly near. He studied Dutch perspective, played with Prussian blue, and stitched narrative through sequences, anticipating the cinematic pan and zoom long before cinema existed.
Pop culture keeps Hokusai thrillingly current. "The Great Wave" has become a universal sign of awe. Quoted in album art, posters, streetwear capsules, tattoos, and emojis. Animators channel his dynamic diagonals, comics, video games and film title sequences echo his crisp silhouettes, contemporary artists and brands remix Fuji and the Wave as shorthand for epic scale.
On his birthday, we celebrate not just a master of ukiyo-e but a maker of modern vision — proof that the world’s rhythm can be drawn as pure movement.
