Hokusai Manga
The Hokusai Manga is a collection of sketches of various subjects by the Japanese artist Hokusai. Subjects of the sketches include landscapes, flora and fauna, everyday life and the supernatural.
The word manga in the title does not refer to the contemporary story-telling manga, as the sketches in the work are not connected to each other. While manga has come to mean "comics" in modern Japanese, the word was used in the Edo period to mean informal drawings, possibly preparatory sketches for paintings.
Block-printed in three colours, the Hokusai Manga comprises thousands of images in ten volumes from 1814 to 1819, with five volumes added in 1834 to 1878. The first volume was published in 1814, when the artist was 55.
The final three volumes were published posthumously, two of them assembled by their publisher from previously unpublished material. The final volume was made up of previously published works, some not even by Hokusai, and is not considered authentic by art historians.
Publication history
The preface to the first volume of the work, written by Hanshū Sanjin, a minor artist of Nagoya, suggests that the publication of the work may have been aided by Hokusai's pupils. Part of the preface reads:The final volume is considered spurious by some art historians.
The initial publication is usually credited to Eirakuya Toshiro of Nagoya whose publishing house was renamed to Eito Shoten in 1914.