가쓰시카 호쿠사이

The most reproduced image ever to come out of Japan, a great claw of a wave arching over three little boats with Mount Fuji small and calm in the distance, was made by a man in his 70s. Hokusai began his Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji around 1830, when he was about 70, and said flatly that nothing he had done before the age of 70 was worth counting. He meant to keep improving until, he wrote, at 110 every dot and line would be alive. He got to 88.

He worked through the Edo period, the long stretch when Japan had sealed itself off from nearly all foreign contact, and he was restless inside that closed world in a way that is hard to overstate. He changed his artist's name more than 30 times across his career, sometimes selling an old name to a student, and near the end signed himself the Old Man Mad About Painting. He drew everything, actors, ghosts, wrestlers, waterfalls, and thousands of quick sketches he published as a kind of encyclopaedia of the visible world.

The wave carries a small piece of hidden history in its colour. That deep blue is Prussian blue, a synthetic pigment invented in Berlin, newly arrived through the one port Japan kept open for trade. The picture that reads as purely Japanese was painted with an imported chemical. And it travelled the other way too. When Japan reopened a few decades later, cheap prints like Hokusai's poured into Europe, and painters from Monet to Van Gogh seized on them for their flat colour and steep angles. Van Gogh copied Japanese prints by hand in oil, and in a letter told his brother he had counted the details in one of them, astonished that a single man could put in so much. Hokusai never learned that any of this had happened; he died in 1849, four years before the American ships arrived that would force Japan open.