First Volume of Hokusai's Sketches (Hokusai gafu shohen)

First Volume of Hokusai's Sketches (Hokusai gafu shohen) is an illustrated woodblock-printed book designed by Katsushika Hokusai and now held in the Harvard Art Museums. The volume forms the opening installment of a separate series of color-printed sketch albums Hokusai produced alongside the better-known Hokusai manga, presenting carefully composed plates in a more elaborate format than the manga's dense documentary pages.

Unlike the predominantly monochrome Hokusai manga, the Hokusai gafu albums use full-color woodblock printing across each plate. Each spread is typically dedicated to a single subject: a flowering plant, a bird, a landscape, a genre scene, a literary anecdote. The compositions are designed to function as finished pictorial statements in their own right, rather than as densely packed study sheets, and they showcase Hokusai's color sense as well as his draftsmanship.

The Shohen, or First Volume, opens the sequence with a survey of subjects characteristic of Hokusai's mature interests: bird-and-flower studies, Mount Fuji glimpsed across rural fields, fishermen at work, classical literary scenes, and supernatural episodes drawn from Chinese and Japanese tradition. Each plate is signed and the volume's preface and table of contents set up the editorial logic of the wider series.

As an Edo ukiyo-e book project, the Hokusai gafu represents a hinge between the documentary sketchbook tradition and the single-sheet color landscape ukiyo-e print. Its influence on later illustrated books in Japan was substantial, and like the manga it circulated to Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, where it shaped Japoniste taste. This volume by Katsushika Hokusai remains a touchstone for understanding the bridge between sketch and finished design in Edo ukiyo-e.