Hokusai manga shichi hen (Hokusai's Sketched Pictures, Volume 7), Katsushika Hokusai

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"Inspired by Japan," Mar-2003, Cori Sherman
Illustrated bound books represented a large percentage of the print production in Edo Japan. Novels, pattern books and guidebooks for restaurants, plays and the pleasure quarters commanded a substantial share of consumer spending during the Edo period (1600-1868). Although the Spencer Museum’s collection of Japanese woodcuts contains a wide variety of artists, styles and types of prints, it had only one two-volume set by an unknown artist of Views and History of Kyoto, donated to the museum in 1986 in memory of the Quinn family of Sedalia, Missouri.

Hokusai produced fifteen volumes of manga, translated as “random sketches” or “sketches from life.” Each volume is filled with prints from Hokusai’s quickly rendered, often humorous, sketches of people, objects, places, or scenes. This original edition of Volume 7 of Hokusai Manga, with its original binding, is a compilation of artist sketches of landscapes.
Mary Dusenbury, Cori Sherman, Laura Pasch

Archive Label 2003 (version 2):
Hokusai’s books of manga, or sketched pictures, were immensely popular in Japan when they were first published and later proved irresistible to Europeans. Volumes were filled with landscape views, wide varieties of flora and fauna, and an amazing assortment of figure studies showing people of every body type in every position possible. The sketch-like quality of the images transmits a sense of immediacy and personality to figures in action. Hokusai’s charming images were copied in woodcut, etching, painting, and even porcelain dinnerware, earning a place of honor in the history of Western art.

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Hokusai was the most prolific artist in Edo during his lifetime. His fifteen volumes of manga, or sketched pictures, were immensely popular in Japan when they were published. The Manga were equally irresistible to Europeans after a volume was found in Auguste Delâtre's (1822-1907) printing studio in Paris in 1856. Hokusai's charming images were copied by French artists in etching, woodcut, painting and even ceramic. This scene of the Crag Bridge (Iwahashi) was reproduced in Franz von Siebold's travelogue with lithograph illustrations, published in Leiden in 1831. Volume 7 of Hokusai's Manga is devoted to landscape. Other volumes in the series focus on figure studies and genre scenes of everyday actions. The sketch-like quality of the Hokusai's images transmits a sense of immediacy and familiarity that was appreciated by Japanese and European audiences alike.