Hokusai soga 北斎麁画

FSC-GR-780.239

Commentary by Ann Yonemura

Posted November 2014

Hokusai soga includes some of the artist’s most complex and beautifully rendered figure illustrations. The volume presents a wide variety of double-page illustrations of landscapes, rural scenes, close-up views of birds or flowers, imagined scenes of China, and work and leisure activities. The Pulverer volume is printed in ink with light gray and pink colors. A monochrome imprint is also known.

Many of the illustrations in Hokusai soga prefigure ideas and compositions that reappeared later in the artist’s famous single-sheet color print series of the 1830s: Fugaku sanjūrokukei (Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji). These include a series of bridges and one of waterfalls; the untitled ōban “flowers” series; a striking set of bird and flower prints, also untitled; and the incompletely published series Hyakunin isshū uba ga etoki (One hundred poets, one verse each, as told by the nurse) (Hillier 1980, p. 114).

Selected reading:

Jack Hillier, The Art of Hokusai in Book Illustration (London: Sotheby Parke-Bernet Publications; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 114, 151–57.

Jack Hillier, The Art of the Japanese Book, vol. 2 (New York: Sotheby’s Publication, 1987), pp. 783–85, 788.

Copies in other collections:

British Library, London

Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Library