ABSTRACT
Over the course of a career spanning seven decades, from the 1770s until his death in 1849, Katsushika Hokusai created some 25 artists' manuals, many of which expanded and reinterpreted the genre in significant ways. First published in 1812, Hokusai's Quick Guide to Painting is often linked with two later, equally ingenious "quick" guides, Quick Lessons in Painting and Quick Pictorial Dictionary, with which it was reissued as a single edition in the 1890s. Quick Guide to Painting may be situated within the flourishing literary genre commonly characterized today as gesaku, whose irreverent style and attitude would have been familiar to an early nineteenth-century audience. Unlike many of his contemporaries who also published how-to books, Hokusai did not seek to promote specific motifs or personal brush styles through his Quick Guide to Painting. The compass and square are instruments associated in Europe with geometry, a term whose Greek etymology comes from measuring the earth, and thus with mathematics.
