Katsushika Hokusai biography in Biographies from the artzine on artrepublic.com

Japanese artist Katsukawa Hokusai is one of the most famous names in oriental art, and the epitome of the later Ukiyo-e ('floating world') school.

Hokusai is best-known as author of the woodblock print series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (c. 1831) which includes the iconic and internationally recognized print, The Great Wave of Kanagawa. It was this series, specifically The Great Wave print and Fuji in Clear Weather, that secured Hokusai’s fame both within Japan and world wide.

The Great Wave depicts an enormous wave threatening boats near the Japanese prefecture of Kanagawa; Mount Fuji can be seen in the background. The wave is probably not intended to be a tsunami, but a normal ocean wave created by the wind. Like the other prints in the series, it depicts the area around Mount Fuji under particular conditions.

Over the years Hokusai’s work and in particular the image of the Great Wave has inspired artists all over the world. Copies of the print hang at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the British Museum in London, and in Claude Monet's house in Giverny, France.

His given name was Tokitarō but he used a constantly-changing sequence of art names. He entered the studio of Katsukawa Shunshō as a self-taught artist in 1778. He rapidly developed a reputation as a painter and as a designer of surimono, using the name Sōri. Soon after this he took the name Hokusai ('North studio').

From this time, Hokusai also often signed himself, Gakyōjin ('the man mad about painting') Hokusai. He lived a reclusive life with his daughters, including Oi, a fine painter in her own right. In 1811 Hokusai met Maki Bokusen (1775-1824) in Nagoya, who arranged for publication the first ten volumes of the Hokusai Manga ('Hokusai Sketches') between 1812 and 1819.

1820 marked the beginning of Hokusai's second sixty-year cycle, when he took the name Iitsu ('one year old again') and embarked on a highly productive period designing prints, surimono and book illustrations. He used the new Prussian blue pigment to revolutionary effect in the series Fugaku sanjūrokkei ('Thirty-Six Views of Fuji' about 1829-32). This was quickly followed by his most famous book, Fugaku hyakkei ('100 Views of Fuji').

Late in life he lost everything in a fire at his lodgings, and devoted the last ten years of his life to painting increasingly transcendent subjects, such as tigers and mythic creatures.