British Museum Showcases 19th Century Hokusai Artists For The First Time

The Great Wafe off Kanagawa karya Hokusai (Wikimedia Commons/Metropolitan Museum of Art)

JAKARTA - The British Museum said on Tuesday 20 July that it will be exhibiting more than 100 sketches by Japanese ukiyo-e artist Katsushika Hokusai, in exhibitions starting next September.

The works displayed are Hokusai's forgotten 19th century works, which resurfaced in 2019. Ukiyo-e is a woodcutting technique that developed in Japan during the Edo period, used to reproduce paintings, landscapes, natural conditions and everyday life in society.

In the exhibition that will run until January next year, a total of 103 postcard-sized sketches were drawn by Hokusai (1760-1849), to make woodblock prints for the unpublished visual encyclopedia entitled "The Great Picture Book of Everything".

The sketch, made in the first half of the 19th century, includes dramatized scenes from ancient China and Buddhism in India, as well as studies of real and artificial animals and birds, citing Kyodo News July 22.

One of Hokusai's works. (Wikimedia Commons/Bilbao Fine Arts Museum)

The museum, which acquired the images last year, said the images were last recorded publicly at a 1948 auction in Paris. Since then, the images are thought to have been kept as private collections, before being 'rediscovered' in 2019, nearly 200 years after the painting was created.

Hokusai is best known for its colored woodblock prints such as the famous 1831 work 'The Great Wave off Kanagawa', which will also be displayed at the autumn exhibition.

During Japan's isolationist period under the Tokugawa Shogunate, when overseas travel was severely restricted, the volume was intended as a guide to introduce other cultures and the natural world to ordinary Japanese, according to the museum.

One of Hokusai's works. (Wikimedia Commons/葛飾北斎)

The so-called 'block-ready' image known as 'hanshita-e', is believed to have been preserved because it was not destroyed in the process of making block printing, with the encyclopedia project never being completed.

Museum director Hartwig Fischer told an online press conference that Hokusai had let his imagination run wild to bring scenes from across the continent to life.

"We are so proud to find that we can share this amazing work of art, hidden from the world for so long," said Fischer.

It was planned that the exhibition would take place in London from September 30 to January 30, 2022, which was previously postponed from earlier this year due to the coronavirus pandemic.