Making waves | 25 May 2017

The end, whenever it came, was always going to be too soon for Katsushika Hokusai. There was still so much to see. So much he had not painted. On his deathbed, Hokusai, attended by his doctor, said a prayer. ‘If heaven will extend my life by ten more years…’. He paused and made a private calculation. ‘If heaven will afford me five more years of life, then I’ll manage to become a true artist.’ He may have been 90, but he wasn’t done yet.

In life, Hokusai (1760–1849) painted dragons, creatures of long life, by the dozen. He has them disappear in puffs of inky smoke, then reappear across the page. He painted the phoenix, bird of resurrection. He painted Mount Fuji, immutable, enduring, outlasting all his fellow painters, calligraphers, woodblock-cutters and sellers of coloured books who scrabbled for a living in Edo, modern Tokyo. They were but cherry blossoms, pink for a season, maple leaves washed away by a current.