Katsushika Hokuju

Katsushika Hokuju (active 1800s-1820s) was a Japanese woodblock print designer of the late Edo period whose innovative landscape compositions made him one of the most important transitional figures in the development of ukiyo-e landscape printmaking. A direct pupil of the towering master Katsushika Hokusai, Hokuju adopted his teacher's family name and worked within the Hokusai school during the decades when the genre of pure landscape print, or fukei-ga, was emerging as a major branch of ukiyo-e. His distinctive synthesis of traditional Japanese composition with imported Western perspective techniques and atmospheric effects helped establish the visual vocabulary that Hokusai himself would later deploy to legendary effect in the Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji of the early 1830s.

Very little documentary evidence survives about Hokuju's life. His birth and death dates are not recorded, and scholars must reconstruct his career from the prints he signed and from the publishers' colophons attached to his designs. The signatures vary across his output: he most often signed his work Shotei Hokuju or simply Hokuju, with the surname Katsushika identifying his school affiliation. Active roughly from the first decade of the nineteenth century through the 1820s, he was producing landscape series at a moment when the genre was still finding its commercial footing. Earlier ukiyo-e had been dominated by portraits of beautiful women (bijin-ga) and kabuki actors (yakusha-e), with landscape relegated to background elements behind figures. Hokuju was among the first generation of designers to make the landscape itself the subject of the print.

Hokuju's training under Hokusai placed him at the center of the most experimental workshop in Edo. Hokusai had himself absorbed influences from Dutch copperplate engravings smuggled into Japan through the trading concession at Nagasaki, and he had spent decades testing how Western linear perspective could be reconciled with traditional Japanese pictorial conventions. Hokuju inherited this curiosity and pushed it further than his master had in some respects. Where Hokusai often blended Western devices invisibly into otherwise Japanese-feeling compositions, Hokuju frequently emphasized the perspective scheme as a deliberate stylistic statement, producing prints with strongly receding diagonal lines, exaggerated foreground-to-background scale shifts, and skies graded with atmospheric color in imitation of European chiaroscuro.

His most important works are the landscape series he produced for Edo publishers during the 1810s, particularly the series Eastern Capital (Toto), Tokaido Road (Tokaido), and New Perspective Pictures (Shin uki-e). The Toto series surveyed celebrated views of Edo, the shogunal capital, depicting bridges, river crossings, shrines, and the busy waterfront where ferry boats and timber rafts plied the bay. The Tokaido series followed the great highway connecting Edo with the imperial capital at Kyoto, anticipating by more than a decade the famous Tokaido series that Utagawa Hiroshige would publish to enormous acclaim in 1833-1834. The New Perspective Pictures (Shin uki-e) made the connection to Western viewing explicit in its title: uki-e was the term Japanese printmakers used for compositions structured around vanishing-point perspective, and the word Shin (new) signaled that Hokuju was offering a fresh take on this established sub-genre.