Katsushika Hokusai signature

Who Katsushika Hokusai was

Katsushika Hokusai was born in Edo, today’s Tokyo, in 1760 and died there in 1849, aged about 88. Painter, print designer and book illustrator, he made the Great Wave off Kanagawa, the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji and the many volumes of sketches known as the Hokusai Manga.

Japanese artists of his time worked under art names (gō), and Hokusai changed his more often than almost anyone. His signatures are a record of those changes.

The story of the signature

Over his career Hokusai used more than thirty art names. He started as Shunrō while a pupil of the print designer Katsukawa Shunshō, later worked as Sōri, and from around 1798 used Hokusai, the name that stuck. He went on to sign as Taito, Iitsu and finally, from 1834, Gakyō Rōjin Manji, “old man mad about painting, Manji”. He sometimes passed an old name on to a pupil, which complicates attribution.

His signatures often record the change itself. Many prints of the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, published around 1830–32, including the Great Wave, are signed “Hokusai aratame Iitsu hitsu”: “from the brush of Iitsu, formerly Hokusai”. His book One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji (1834–35) is credited to Gakyō Rōjin Manji, formerly Hokusai Iitsu.

In the afterword to that book he wrote that nothing he had drawn before seventy was worth much, and hoped that by 110 every dot and line would be alive. Signatures on his paintings are written with the brush in Japanese characters and are usually accompanied by a seal.

What makes it distinctive

How to give your signature a similar feel

• For your own name in Latin letters, try Kristi in the Type tab of the signature generator: its scratchy, spontaneous line echoes a quick brush. Keep the Slant at 0° to 4°.
• Draw a brush-like signature in the Draw tab: press slowly for thick strokes and speed up to taper them, because the pad thins the line as you go faster.
• Pair your signature with a small square seal-style monogram drawn from your initials, the way Japanese signatures pair name and seal.
• If you work under a pen name or studio name, sign it consistently, and add your previous name for a while when you change it, as Hokusai did.

Where to see the original

These links lead to archives, libraries, museums and Wikimedia Commons.

• Wikimedia Commons: The Great Wave off Kanagawa, signed “Hokusai aratame Iitsu hitsu” (Metropolitan Museum of Art impression)
• Wikimedia Commons: One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, credited to Gakyō Rōjin Manji (Bibliothèque nationale de France copy)
• Wikimedia Commons: signature and seal on Hokusai’s painting Watermelon (Museum of the Imperial Collections, Tokyo)