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.