In 2020, the British Museum acquired a collection of 103 drawings by
the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai and today I’m very pleased to be able to present a selection
that I particularly like. Hello my name is
Alfred Haft, I’m JTI project curator in the department of Asia and welcome to my corner!
This is the box in which the drawings came to the Museum. I t's a very old and very beautiful box
and it has an inscription on the cover in Chinese characters it's Japanese writing
and it tells us what the drawings were produced for. This is 103 individual drawings but Hokusai
produced them for an illustrated book called ‘The Great Picture Book of Everything’ Banmotsu
ehon daizen zu and here right next to that on the left is Hokusai's signature. It looks like a very
long signature because it includes both his last name and several of the art names that he used.
Based on a couple of letters that he wrote we have an idea that he may have produced these sometime
between the 1820s and 1840s. Unfortunately, we cannot get any closer than that yet.
He produced these drawings for a book that was never actually published.
That is the reason why they survive because during this period when Hokusai lived in Japan
all publications were produced by woodblock which meant that the artist's drawing was pasted down
onto a block, the block cutter cut right through the drawing to make the block for printing.
In every case where you see a Japanese book or a Japanese print the artist's original drawing
is gone. This is a fantastic survival which gives us an idea of Hokusai's own hand
so now we will open the box which in Japanese style has a sliding cover.
I’ll put that aside. And here are the drawings. And I'll turn them towards you
and you can see that this is the title page and some seals and I'll lift them now
out of the box and you can see that this was quite a special box.
There are many boxes used in Japanese art but I personally have never seen any one quite like this
beautiful marbled paper inside and the same paper also lines the underside of the cover
so you know that this was quite a special object that was in someone's collection.
So now I will show you just a few of the drawings themselves and as you can see
there are 103 of them so it is very difficult to choose. So in a way these are just some that I
particularly find of interest and I hope that you will have a chance to see them in person yourself.
The drawings themselves cover three different topics: Buddhist India, ancient China and the
natural world. So we'll start with Buddhist India and here is one of the more beautiful drawings
in the set which shows the Indian Buddhist deity Avalokiteśvara known in Chinese as Guanyin and in
Japanese as Kannon. And she is riding a dragon except you can see how gentle the dragon is.
This is a very friendly dragon for her and the reason they are together is that they're
both defending Buddhism. There are many, many texts in Indian Buddhism, they're called sutras,
and in this case Kannon is the defender of the lotus sutra one of the longest and
best-loved Buddhist sutras. So here she is, and the writing here tells us who she is and this
writing here also tells us the function of her as a protective goddess. What is important to
notice I think about this one in particular is that you'll see that the deity Kannon
and the dragon are done in two slightly different brush styles. The Kannon has a lot of lines
and the dragon is done with brush marks and no outlines and in traditional
east Asian painting line is used to sort of outline a sort of a figure of rank and then
the marks used for the dragon would have seemed as a kind of a slightly more informal style.
And Hokusai in 1816 actually produced an illustrated book called ‘Drawings in Three Styles’
that would help people understand these different styles and how to use them and
that they could learn to draw for themselves. That was something that Hokusai was very interested in
but here he has used he has combined those two techniques in this one drawing.
The next drawing is a fantastic work could have been drawn a couple of years ago by a
manga artist. This fantastic explosion and that's quite exactly what it is, there's a story about
Virūḍhaka who this figure is who eradicated the Buddha's family and in revenge the Buddha
struck him with lightning. And this is the moment of his death when he's sort of struck,
literally thunderstruck, by this bolt of lightning which explodes in this fantastic manga-esque way.
This is a different aspect of the Hokusai's interests in general and also
of these drawings. It's a kind of genre subject, a kind of everyday scene where
this wonderful gentle elephant is being pampered by two attendants. One you see down at the bottom
right and the other one with a little spear here up at the top left. You can just see peering over
the elephant, and the elephant has a wonderful calm expression very patient as though his nails
are being taken care of down at the bottom right. And this wonderful detail of the rope ladder so
that you can climb up onto the elephant and this silk covering. Hokusai would never have travelled
to India because no one in his time could leave Japan. In this case, Hokusai might have had a
chance to actually see an elephant because elephants a couple of times arrived as gifts
from the Dutch and from China. The ruling family of the time his name was the Tokugawa family,
the Shoguns. The Shoguns really didn't know what to do with an elephant, and they had no particular
place to keep one and very often the poor elephant ended up as being a traveling sideshow
and cared for as long as it lived so it is conceivable that he may have seen an elephant.
So now we move on to one of the first of the of the drawings related to China oh
and I should mention that these drawings are in this box in no particular order and
part of the puzzle of researching these drawings has been to figure out what the major topics are,
and how they go together. What we see in this particular drawing is the Daoist
master Zhou Sheng who boasted to friends that he could pluck the moon from the sky,
and they said of course “Well show us!” and he did. He formed a ladder out of clouds
and he climbed right up and he pulled the moon from the sky and put in his pocket and came back
down and of course they were all amazed. But this is Hokusai's depiction of the climax of that story
and what's fantastic is if you have a sense of somebody climbing up to the sky
how do you convey in a drawing how high up they are? Because all they will have in the background
is perhaps the moon and clouds but how do you send how do you convey how high up they are? Hokusai
has done that with this little mountain peak which is a Chinese style peak but it has tapered right
to the top so you can really get a sense that he is beyond the highest mountains. It's a wonderful
way of a very simple device, but very effective, and again just so that you know we know what the
story is because it is a well-known story but also Hokusai tells us in this text right here.
So similarly to the section of India, the Chinese drawings also have what to me are genre subjects,
not many but a few. And this is one of them here you see the fellow with the
black hood and the white robes is a Confucian scholar and he's probably traveling from one
home to another teaching, finding employment, looking for employment, and he's with his retinue,
his entourage there. One of them has what may be a box of books at the bottom but what is happening
here is that they are taking shelter from the rain from a sudden rainstorm in the shell of a
mythological bird's egg. But what's fantastic is that when you really look closely they're
just waiting until the rain stops as we might in a bus stop or a bus shelter or under a building.
Hokusai again has been able to sort of capture a kind of human essence to a very ordinary moment
and we don't know necessarily why or how he picked this particular subject but it really relates
to what were what was a very important interest for him and that is a recurring theme in many
of his works including the famous series 36 views of Mount Fuji and the Hokusai sketches.
Encyclopaedias during this period very often included information about what would have been
foreign lands and people and peoples that Hokusai and his contemporaries could not have visited but
would have liked to know about and in this case Hokusai has given us three different kinds of
people; one person from India, one person from China and one person from Korea. Sort of the three
cultures that formed the mainstreams of Japanese history and culture in this period. We're reading
here from right to left, India with a figure in Indian robes and wearing a cloth hat figure in the
middle Chinese also wearing a Chinese style hat with a little tag at the back and these Chinese
style robes and of course a very formal Chinese style pose with his hands held formally in his
robes and then on the left a Korean figure with a Korean style hat so there these are these are
basic conventions that Hokusai is conveying to us and this is how you might recognize them.
Now I personally have not come across a bear in much of Japanese art and I think this is a
really interesting subject because it shows the intelligence of a bear. All a bear has to do in
order to feed is to wait under a waterfall and wait for the fish to come to it. So this
is probably a bear in springtime waiting for the salmon and you can see how patient this bear is,
he is in absolutely no hurry. He's got a lot of fur and he's just waiting for lunch. What is
also particularly wonderful about this is the stylization of the waves
because I think some of you may recognize from these waves and think ‘Ah where have
I seen those before?” You will have seen them before on Hokusai's most famous work
‘The Great Wave’ and you can see Hokusai using motifs in different contexts to express similar
sort of energy in the natural world and natural phenomenon that's what we're really seeing here.
This is a lot of birds, and they're all water birds. But what is particularly
fantastic is something that you might miss if you were not looking closely is the duck
at the bottom in the centre. He's actually framed in the way Hokusai has presented
and there's a reason because Hokusai I particularly liked this duck. He liked
presenting this duck so that you feel like the duck is aware of you and is as interested in you
as you are in it and that has to do with the composition that he's used. And as you can see
perhaps in the painting just behind me there's a very similar duck. This is a motif that Hokusai
rethought over a long period of time so this duck was particularly important to him.
What is interesting about this particular drawing is that it combines cats with hibiscus. This looks
like a domestic subject something that an artist might notice out of the corner of his eye when
he was leaving the house to go to shop down the street but the combination of cats and flowers is
an established east Asian pictorial convention so Hokusai is aware of these larger Asian
conventions, but conveys them in a way that makes them feel real and alive. So those are the cats
And I’ll show you… you know what? There are 103 of these and I would go through these all day
long but I hope that you'll be able to see our fantastic exhibition showing the complete set.
It will be as though you are seeing a complete book out on display, which is very unusual
in a museum. If you are not able to come to London the Museum is very pleased to be
publishing a book titled ‘Hokusai: The Great Picture Book of Everything’ and that will have
much more detail on the background of the drawings themselves, on Hokusai,
how they came to the Museum and the research that is being done on each of the drawings.
What do they mean? How do they fit together? and so on. Everything that you might want to know. We
hope will be able to enjoy both the exhibition and in the publication but of course there is always
research being done and there is always more to learn about these drawings. So we hope will that
not only will you be interested in the exhibition and the publication but that this may even inspire
you to pursue Hokusai research on your own in which case please share with us what you find out.