Katsushika Hokusai

Hokusai changed his working name more than thirty times across seventy years — a rate unusual even by the standards of a period when artists routinely took new names. He was published at nineteen and still working the week he died at eighty-eight.

He was about seventy when he began Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, the series most people know him by. The premise is a constraint: one mountain, seen from wherever you happen to be standing. Fuji appears in every print, sometimes as the subject and sometimes as a small white shape behind a wave, a rooftop or a stand of trees, and the series is really about everything in front of it.

He signed late work 'Gakyō Rōjin' — the old man mad about painting — and wrote that nothing he had made before seventy was worth counting.

Biography compiled from the artist's Wikidata entity and English Wikipedia article (linked above). Work-level facts — title, date, medium, dimensions, inscriptions, provenance — come from the catalogue record of the institution holding each print, cited on the individual work. Public domain status is asserted by the holding institution; Australian copyright independently verified as life + 70 years from the artist's Wikidata death date. Wikipedia ↗