富士越龍図

Hokusai painted this in the first month of 1849, and by May he was dead at 90. He signed it as the brush of Manji, old man of ninety, born in the dragon year of 1760, on a dragon day. He had been born in a year of the dragon and chose to make this dragon his first work of that final New Year. A long serpentine body twists up through dark cloud, with Mount Fuji small and pale behind it. Readers have long taken the dragon to stand for Hokusai himself, still climbing after a lifetime of work. He had once written that if heaven granted him even a few more years, he might finally learn to paint.