ABSTRACT
Over the course of a career spanning seven decades, from the 1770s until his death in 1849, Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) created some 25 artists’ manuals, many of which expanded and reinterpreted the genre in significant ways. Among these is Quick Guide to Painting (Ryakuga haya oshie), intended to teach aspiring artists how to paint by visualizing the world in a simple formal vocabulary of squares, circles, and triangles (Fig. 5.1). Hokusai’s guide has long charmed viewers with the variety and playfulness of its forms, but it has been privileged by modern scholars both in Japan and abroad primarily because of its apparent indebtedness to European painting manuals introduced to Japan by the Dutch.1 This reductive, influence-based model of studying the movement of artistic idioms across borders suggests an active originator (always the “modern” West) and a passive reception on the part of the Japanese artist. The availability of such publications alone does not explain why Hokusai took notice of them or what he
did with them. He had the freedom to “read” them or not, and having chosen to do so, he had to translate them into an idiom his Japanese readers could understand. Vision, as W. J. T. Mitchell has written, is “a mode of cultural expression and human communication as fundamental and widespread as a language,” and, its translation, far from being a transparent process, involves problems of context and readers’ expectations.2 In this article I hope to show that Hokusai’s apprehension and translation of European manuals was not the direct process it is often made out to be, but complex, and heavily mediated by a host of local idioms and contingencies.
