Hokusai’s Botanical Atlas

Introduction

Cherry blossoms, morning glories, chrysanthemums, and the many other plants that color the four seasons—Hokusai's illustrations of plants encompass a variety of expressive styles ranging from simple one-line renderings to finely detailed depictions using multiple layers of line and color. For this exhibition, we have filled the galleries with Hokusai's pictures of plants to showcase the world of trees, grasses, and flowers for your enjoyment, carefully selecting works from our collection with related subjects and organizing them by type and characteristic in the manner of a botanical atlas.
Hokusai portrayed a great many plants in his work, numbering more than a hundred varieties. In addition to grasses, trees, and flowers, they also include root crops like giant radishes (daikon), tubers (imo), and wasabi and fruits such as Japanese plums (ume), apples (ringo), loquats (biwa), and grapes (budō). Cherished in Japan since ancient times, plants such as creeping saxifrage (yukinoshita), golden lace (ominaeshi), balloon flowers (kikyō), chrysanthemums (kiku), and silver grass (susuki) have long been incorporated in paintings and decorations.
Hokusai appears to have been fascinated by the various forms that plant take, even sketching all sorts of leaves including those of the maple, ginkgo, aspidistra, and pine. In Random Drawings by Hokusai [Hokusai manga], for example, many pages contain nothing but leaves of various shapes. The diversity of plant life seen in Hokusai's paintings, too, suggests the depth of his fascination with the botanical world. On the Use of Coloring [Ehon saishikitsū], the final book on which Hokusai worked, was a copybook (or textbook) produced for his students. Its detailed renderings of sunflowers (himawari), daffodils (suisen), and other plants closely resemble those found in a botanical atlas.
How did the plants favored by the people of Edo, and those familiar to us today, appear when seen through Hokusai's eyes, and how did he represent them in his work? In this exhibition, we hope you enjoy perusing Hokusai's world of plants as if turning the pages of a botanical atlas.