Wassermelone

Hokusai was 80 when he painted this, and he wrote the number beside his signature: aged eighty. That same year, 1839, a fire went through his studio in Edo and destroyed the drawings stored there.

On the silk there is a watermelon cut in half, a kitchen knife laid across it, and the rind pared away in one long ribbon that hangs over the edge. Japanese scholars read the arrangement as the Kikkoden, the ritual of the seventh night of the seventh month, when the two stars of the Tanabata legend cross the Milky Way to meet. The halved melon stands for the basin of water set out to catch their reflection, the red and white peel for the paper threads hung up for the festival, the seeds for stars, the blade for the river of the sky. He went on signing his pictures with his age until he died in 1849.