Katsushika Hokusai

Hokusai worked for seventy years, used more than thirty art names, and produced something in the order of thirty thousand designs — prints, paintings, book illustrations and the fifteen volumes of sketches known as the Manga, which were studies for students rather than anything resembling modern comics. The work everyone knows, the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, was begun when he was around seventy. He was explicit about considering himself a late developer: in a famous postscript he wrote that nothing he produced before seventy was worth counting, and that if he were granted until ninety he might finally understand how to draw. He died at eighty-eight. His prints depended on a collaborative workshop — a publisher who commissioned and financed, a blockcutter who carved the designer's drawing into cherry wood, and a printer who inked and pulled — so the gradations that make Red Fuji remarkable are the printer's achievement as much as his. Within decades of his death his work reached Europe and reorganised how Van Gogh, Gauguin, Monet and Whistler composed a picture.