Katsushika Hokusai

📍Honjo District, Edo (now Sumida, Tokyo), Japan

“I was born Katsushika Hokusai around 1760 in the Honjo district of Edo. I changed my name at least thirty times during my career, which lasted over seventy years. I was apprenticed to a woodblock engraver at fourteen and spent the following seven decades producing an estimated thirty thousand works. The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, including The Great Wave off Kanagawa, were produced when I was in my seventies. I moved house nearly a hundred times during my life, always within Edo. I said at seventy-three that nothing I had produced before the age of seventy was worth much. At ninety I said that if I could have ten more years I would at last become a true artist. I died at eighty-nine.”

Sources: Nagata, S. Hokusai: Genius of the Japanese Ukiyo-e (1995), Kodansha; Lane, R. Hokusai: Life and Work (1989), Dutton