Hokusai: The Great Picture Book of Everything

Abstract

• The accompanying hardback title to the British Museum exhibition Hokusai: The Great Picture Book of Everything. This landmark publication documents a major new discovery of over 100 drawings by the foremost Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai. Acquired by the British Museum in 2020, these previously unpublished drawings had been forgotten for over 70 years. All 103 exquisite drawings are reproduced at full size for the first time. Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) is considered by many to be Japan’s greatest artist. During his seventy-year career, he produced a considerable oeuvre of some 3,000 colour prints, illustrations for over 200 books, hundreds of drawings and over 1,000 paintings. This exciting collection of over 103 exquisite small drawings were made for an unpublished book called The Great Picture Book of Everything – featuring wide-ranging subjects from depictions of religious, mythological, historical and literary figures to animals, birds, flowers and other natural phenomena, as well as landscapes. They are dominated by subjects that relate to ancient China and India, also Southeast and Central Asia. Many subjects found in the collection are not found in previous Hokusai works, including fascinating imaginings of the origin of human culture in ancient China. This beautifully produced book draws on the latest research, illustrating the complete set of drawings, published for the first time.