Hokusai. Edmond de Goncourt
is plausible that, following commitments made by the grandfather to keep his grandson from going to prison, commitments that he could not keep, he was forced to leave Edo in secret, to take refuge more than thirty leagues from there in the Sagami province, in the city of Uraga, hiding his artistic name under the common name of Miuraya Hatiyemon. Even upon returning to Edo, he did not dare, at first, give out his address and called himself the “priest-painter”, and moved into the courtyard of the Mei-o-in temple, in the middle of a small forest. From this exile, which lasted from 1834 to 1839, remain some interesting letters from the painter to his editors. These letters attest to the old man’s trials caused by his grandson’s mischief, and to the destitution of the great artist, who complained, one harsh winter, of having only one robe to keep his septuagenarian body warm. These letters unveil his attempts to soften his editors, through the melancholy exposition of his misery, illustrated with nice sketches. They also unveil some of his ideas on translating his drawings into woodcuts, initiated in the language marked by crude images with which he was able to make the workers charged with printing his works understand the way to obtain artistic prints.
Kabuki Theater in Edo seen from an Original Perspective, c. 1788–1789.
Nishiki-e, 26.3 × 39.3 cm.
The British Museum, London.
Kintoki the Herculean Child with a Bear and an Eagle, c. 1790–1795.
Ōban, nishiki-e.
Ostasiatische Kunstsammlung, Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin.
The year 1839, which followed three years of poor rice harvests, was a year of scarcity during which Japanese restrained their spending and no longer bought images and where editors refused to cover the publication costs of a book or a single plate. During this editors’ strike, Hokusai, counting on the popularity of his name, had the idea of composing albums from “the tip of his brush”, and he earned about what he needed to live during this year from the sale of these original drawings, undoubtedly sold very cheaply. It was in 1839 that Hokusai returned to Edo, after four years of exile in Uraga. But this was another miserable year for the artist. He had only just moved in, again settling in Honjô, the country neighbourhood that the painter loved, when a fire burnt his house; it destroyed many of his drawings, outlines, and sketches, and the painter was only able to save his brush.
At the age of sixty-eight or sixty-nine, Hokusai had an attack of apoplexy, from which he emerged by treating it with ‘lemon curd’, a remedy in Japanese medicine, whose composition was given by the painter to his friend Tosaki, with sketches in the margin of the prescription representing the lemon, the knife for cutting the lemon, and the pot. Here is the composition of this ‘lemon curd’: “Within twenty-four Japanese hours (forty-eight hours) of the attack, take a lemon and cut it into small pieces with a bamboo knife, not an iron or copper one. Put the lemon, thus cut, into a clay pot. Add a go (one quarter litre) of very good sake and let it cook over low heat until the mixture thickens. Then, you must swallow, in two doses, the lemon curd, after removing the seeds, in hot water; the medicinal effect will take place after twenty-four or thirty hours.” This remedy completely cured Hokusai and seems to have kept him healthy until 1849, when he fell ill at ninety years old, in a house in Asakusa, the ninety-third home in his vagabond life of moving from one house to another. This is, undoubtedly, when he wrote to his old friend Takaghi this ironically allusive letter: “King Yemma is very old and is preparing to retire from business. He has built, to this end, a pretty country house and he has asked me to go paint him a kakemono. I am thus obliged to leave, and when I do leave, I will take my drawings with me. I will rent an apartment at the corner of Hell Street, where I will be happy to have you visit if you have the occasion to stop by. Hokusai.”
The Actor Ichikawa Yaozō III in the Role of Soga no Gorō and Iwai Hanshirō IV in the Role of his Mistress, Sitting, 1791.
Hosoban, nishiki-e.
Japanese Ukiyo-e Museum, Matsumoto.
The Actor Ichikawa Omezō in the Role of Soga no Gorō, 1792.
Nishiki-e, 27.2 × 12.7 cm.
Museum Volkenkunde, Leiden.
The Actor Ichikawa Ebizō IV, 1791.
Nishiki-e, 30.8 × 14 cm.
National Museum of Tokyo, Tokyo.
The Actor Sakata Hangorō III, 1791.
Nishiki-e, 31.4 × 13.5 cm.
Museum of Fine Arts, William Sturgis Bigelow Collection, Boston.
At the time of his last illness, Hokusai was surrounded by the filial love of his students, and was cared for by his daughter Oyei, who had divorced her husband and was living with her father. The thoughts of the dying “crazy artist”, always trying to defer his death to perfect his talent, made him repeat in a voice that was no longer more than a whisper, “if heaven would only give me ten more years…” There, Hokusai broke off, and after a pause, “if heaven would only give me five more years of life… I could become a truly great painter.”
Hokusai died at the age of ninety, on the eighteenth day of the fourth month of the second year of Kayei (10 May, 1849). The poetry of his last moment, as he left in death, is almost untranslatable: “Oh! Freedom, beautiful freedom, when one goes into the summer fields to leave his perishable body there!” Another tomb was erected for him by his granddaughter, Shiraï Tati, in the garden of the Seikioji temple of Asakusa, next to the gravestone of his father, Kawamura Ïtiroyemon. One can read on the large gravestone: Gwakiojin Manjino Haka (Tomb of Manji, crazy old artist); on the base: Kawamura Uji (Kawamura family). On the left side of the gravestone, at the top, are three religious names: Firstly, Nanso-in Kiyo Hokusai shinji (the knight of the faith, Hokusai in colourful glory), Nanso (a religious figure from the South of So); Secondly, Seisen-in Hō-oku Mioju Shin-nio, the name of a woman who died in 1828, who may be his second wife; and thirdly, Jô-un Mioshin Shin-nio, another name of a woman who died in 1821, that of one of his daughters.
It is uncertain as to whether or not there is an existing authentic portrait of the master. The portrait of Hokusai, together with the novelist Bakin, after a stamp by Kuniyoshi, is no longer a portrait, as the sketch represents him kneeling, offering the editor his little yellow book, “The Tactics of General Fourneau”, or of “Improvisational Cuisine”. Of the great artist, there are no childhood or adult portraits. The only existing portrait is the one given by the Japanese biography by Iijima Hanjuro, a portrait of him as an old man, preserved in the family and which had been painted by his daughter Oyei, who signed Ohi. One sees a forehead furrowed by deep wrinkles, eyes marked by crow’s feet with swollen bags beneath them, and there is, in the half closed eyes, some of that mist that sculptors of netzukes place in the look of their ascetics. The man has a large, bony nose, a thin mouth tucked under the fold of his cheeks and the square chin of a strong will, connected to his neck by wattles. The colouring of the image, which matches the tone of old flesh fairly well, renders well the anaemic pallor of the bags under his eyes, around his mouth, and of his earlobes. What is striking about the face of this man of genius is its length, from his eyebrows to his chin and the low height and dented top of his head, with, at the temples, a few rare little hairs resembling the young grass in his landscapes. Another portrait of Hokusai, of which a facsimile was published in the Katsushika den, represents him near the age of eighty, next to a pot, crouching under a blanket, showing the profile of an old head shaking and of thin legs. Here is the origin of this portrait: the editor Szabo ordered the illustration of the “Hundred Poets”, from Hokusai. The artist, before starting his work, sent a sample to determine the format of the publication, and on this sample, his brush left this “caricature”.
Actors Ichikawa Kōmazu II and Matsumoto Koshirō IV, c. 1791.
Nishiki-e