Tiger in the Snow

Hokusai painted this tiger in 1849, the last year of his life. He was about 89 and had been drawing and printing for some 70 years, long past the great wave that made his name known abroad. In his final months he turned again and again to tigers. This one bounds through a snowstorm with its legs splayed and its face almost cheerful, and there is no ground beneath it at all, only white air, so the animal seems to float. Hokusai is said to have complained near the end that heaven had not granted him another five or ten years, which would have let him become, as he put it, a real painter.