Hokusai shashin gafu

Hokusai shashin gafu 北斎写真画譜

FSC-GR-780.237 

Commentary by Ann Yonemura

Posted November 2014

Hokusai shashin gafu is an album with a “butterfly” (detchō)  binding that allows each full sheet, pasted back-to-back with the next sheet at the left and right edges, to lie flat when opened. The album contains fifteen full-color illustrations, each printed on a full sheet. The subjects and styles represent a departure from the action-filled illustrations of novels that built Hokusai’s fame as a book designer. The title includes the term shashin, which was later adopted to describe photographs, but here it implies verisimilitude. Each of the simple, close-up compositions focuses on a single subject: flowers, birds, animals, or human figures. Expert block carving and printing replicate the effects of brushstrokes in painting. High-quality paper, thicker than for typical books with stitched bindings (fukurotoji),  was used for this volume. Embossing, a technique often used in privately commissioned prints (surimono), appears in the uncolored areas of a few illustrations in this book. First published in 1814, Hokusai shashin gafu was the first of several books bearing the artist’s name in its title; he created them to demonstrate his virtuosity in drawing and painting and also to reveal to a broad public the distinctive features of his personal artistic style.

Hokusai’s extensive experience as a designer of surimono  had provided opportunities to explore and master a wider range of artistic styles and subjects, including birds, flowers, and landscapes. Two of the designs—of a pair of mandarin ducks and of a branch of plum blossoms—reuse blocks from a large surimono  print published in the previous year (Yonemura 2006, vol. 2, p. 70). [1] The privately commissioned small editions of surimono  employed more costly materials and refined techniques than the single-sheet prints that were destined for the commercial market. Reusing the surimono’s expertly carved blocks was economical, as it made further use of superb block carving after the minimal wear of a small edition. It is also clear evidence of Hokusai’s intention to create a book of exceptional aesthetic quality.

Close-up views of flowers such as peonies and irises prefigure Hokusai’s untitled series of single-sheet prints of flowers published in the 1830s. Figure subjects include a painter applying brushstrokes to the column of a building and an image of the bodhisattva Kannon carried by a dragon. A striking image of a pheasant leaving footprints on the ground recalls the following story: In a painting contest between Hokusai and Tani Bunchō (1763–1840) that had been arranged for the amusement of the shogun, Hokusai dipped the feet of a chicken in paint and let it run across a long scroll that he had painted with blue brushstrokes. He declared that the resulting composition represented “maple leaves on the Tatsuta River.”

The Freer Gallery of Art Library also has a fine first edition of this title, which was a gift of Charles Lang Freer (1854–1919).

Selected reading:

Jack Hillier, The Art of Hokusai in Book Illustration  (London: Sotheby Parke-Bernet Publications; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 89–95.

Jack Hillier, The Art of the Japanese Book, vol. 1 (New York: Sotheby’s Publication, 1987), pp. 780–83.

Ann Yonemura, Hokusai, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 2006).

Copies in other collections:

Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Library, Special Collection, Smithsonian Institution Libraries (NE1325.K3 A684 1819)

Library of Congress, Washington, DC

National Institute of Japanese Literature

Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden (1-4448.kk)

[1] Harvard University Art Museums, Arthur M. Sackler Museum, gift of the Friends of Arthur B. Duel 1933.4.2450