Hokusai manga (Hokusai Sketchbooks), vol. 11

Hokusai manga (Hokusai Sketchbooks), volume 11, is an illustrated woodblock-printed book designed by Katsushika Hokusai and published in 1834 as part of the multi-volume Hokusai manga series. This volume is held in the collection of the Harvard Art Museums.

The Hokusai manga is among the most influential illustrated book projects in the history of Edo ukiyo-e and indeed in the history of world printmaking. Begun in 1814 and continued through fifteen volumes published into the 1870s, it gathers thousands of brushed sketches encompassing every aspect of the visible and imagined world. Each volume is printed in monochrome ink with subtle subsidiary blocks of grey and pink wash, allowing Hokusai's confident brush line to function as the primary structural element of every page.

Volume 11, published two decades into the project, finds Hokusai in his seventies and still at the height of his powers. Its pages survey weather phenomena, supernatural beings, exotic foreign figures, and an array of human postures and occupations. The volume includes well-known studies of effects like wind, rain, lightning, and fog, presented in graphic shorthand that anticipates much later modernist approaches to depicting atmosphere. Other pages set out grotesque demons, foreign envoys, and historical worthies, drawing on a deep knowledge of Chinese painting traditions as well as on Hokusai's own observations.

The manga circulated widely among professional artists, decorators, and amateur draftsmen as a pattern book and reference. Copies famously reached Europe through Nagasaki in the mid-nineteenth century and became one of the principal sources through which Edo ukiyo-e and the language of Japanese brush drawing entered the consciousness of Western artists. As a ukiyo-e print album, this volume preserves Katsushika Hokusai's brushed invention at every scale.