Hokusai's Encyclopedia Japonica

Google The Great Wave, surely the most widely known, the most easily identifiable image in Japanese art, and, in less than a second, you'll get more than 1 billion results, some of which might even tell you something about its creator, the great painter and printmaker Katsushika Hokusai. 

Of course, in the days before the Internet and search engines, you'd have needed to get some sort of reference book off the shelf to find out about something like that. Where to turn first? An encyclopedia, possibly. The Great Picture Book of Everything: that sounds perfect.... let's see; it's got depictions of plants and animals, distant lands and distant peoples, myths and gods, inventions. Who's created the illustrations? Wow, Hokusai himself....

Hokusai: The Great Picture Book of Everything at the British Museum in London puts on public display for the first time more than 100 drawings Hokusai made in the 1820s to 1840s for an encyclopedia that was never actually published. If it had been, the drawings would have been destroyed in the process of creating the woodblocks for the printed pictures. Out of view for decades, the collection has recently been acquired by the museum and shows Hokusai -- the Old Man Crazy to Paint -- as a constantly inventive recorder of the natural and the supernatural, the true and the very far-fetched. 

Hokusai presciently anticipated that the Internet would see an insatiable demand for cat pictures, so here's his image of a couple of them facing off under the leaves of a hibiscus. Claws out, backs arched, hair bristling, ears pricked, tails coiled. It's a miniature masterpiece.

"By age 73 I had acquired some understanding of the structure of birds, animals, insects and fish," Hokusai wrote in 1834. "Maybe when I am into my 110s, each dot and each brushstroke will seem to have a life of its own." 

And as you can see here, every one of his marks on the paper helps build up the picture. Combining the real with the unreal, he captures the animals' different types of coats, giving the bushy tail of the flying raccoon-dog a three-dimensionality that contrasts with the sleekness of the black fox below. Hokusai is likely to have seen the camels that were brought to Edo (now Tokyo) in the 1820s, but he wouldn't have seen the shojo, the mythical ape-like creature that's perched on the camel's back. 

Hokusai portrayed other animals that weren't native to Japan. But whereas he'd seen the camel, his pictures of the tiger and the leopard drew on earlier illustrations. There's a strange rhinoceros too, a sort of hairy goat-like creature with a tortoiseshell on its back. Fascinating, but utterly fictitious. How difficult, of course, to draw things you've never actually seen. You're reminded of Albrecht Dürer's Rhinoceros, drawn from a description. 

Other artists come to mind elsewhere in the show: This sheet could be a black-and-white version from one of the albums of birds by the Scot Archibald Thorburn, or the American John James Audubon. Hokusai fills the space available to him with detailed images of birds including a Japanese ibis and a cormorant, perched on a stump. 

Hokusai also brings to life Chinese myths explaining the origins of many types of activity. Fittingly for an encyclopedia, this one depicts the inventions of printing, paper-making and ink. 

Though the Japanese were prevented from travelling abroad, they were still very interested in other countries. Hokusai draws, with no doubt a fair degree of imagination, various specimens of foreigners for his readers.

The figure in the middle of the sheet below is a European, or a Southern Barbarian as they were known during the Edo period. He's wearing Portuguese clothing from the 16th or early 17th century, but the face really doesn't appear very European.

From men back to myths, and to manga. Hokusai produced volume after volume of sketches, or manga, and the term is used these days for the comics and graphic novels so popular in Japan. You can see in this show elements developed by Hokusai that have their place in modern-day manga. 

Take this comic-book explosion, for example:

From a series of drawings related to Buddhism and India, Hokusai captures the moment when King Virudhaka, who had plotted to annihilate the Buddha's family, was struck dead by a bolt of lightning. The King's robes whirl round him as he's thrown off his feet, and the rays of the blast burst across the page. 

One last image from this show, and it's got a Great Wave element to it:

It's not just the waters threatening this boat, there's a giant sea monster.... And there are many more wondrous tales to be seen in Hokusai's drawings throughout this exhibition: torches that never go out, a severed head leaping from a cauldron to take revenge on its enemies, a Daoist master ascending a cloud-ladder to the moon, travellers sheltering from the rain within the empty shell of an egg laid by the mythical Peng bird. It is, after all, The Great Picture Book of Everything. 

And fear not: There's a section in this show in which you get to see and learn about The Great Wave as well. 

Practicalities

Hokusai: The Great Picture Book of Everything is on at the British Museum until January 30. It's open daily from 1000 to 1700, with lates on Fridays to 2030. You'll want to allow yourself around 75 minutes to take in the exhibition. Full-price tickets are £9 during the week or £11 at weekends and are bookable online here. The museum entrance is on Great Russell St, with Holborn and Tottenham Court Road the nearest Tube stations.

A few words of warning: This was easily the most crowded exhibition we've been in during the past few months and is generally full to capacity, according to museum staff, so you'll need to book in advance to be sure of a ticket. The exhibits themselves are very small, so quite a lot of concentration and patience is required and you may need to wait and shuffle along to get to see all of the drawings. And in some sections, you'll probably need to go against the flow of other visitors if you're to read the wall texts in the intended order....

Images

Katsushika Hokusai, Cats and Hibiscus, from Illustrations for The Great Picture Book of Everything, 1820s-40s. © The Trustees of the British Museum

Katsushika Hokusai, Shojo on a Camel, Flying Raccoon-Dog and Black Fox, 1820s-40s, British Museum

Katsushika Hokusai, Black and White Birds, 1820s-40s, British Museum

Katsushika Hokusai, The Invention of Paper, Publishing and Ink, 1820s-40s, British Museum

Katsushika Hokusai, Emishi, Southern Barbarian and Taiwanese, 1820s-40s, British Museum

Katsushika Hokusai, A Bolt of Lightning Strikes Virudhaka Dead, 1820s-40s, British Museum

Katsushika Hokusai, The Sea Monster Assails a Ship, 1820s-40s, British Museum