Hokusai's Album of Pictures from Nature (Hokusai shashin gafu)

Hokusai's Album of Pictures from Nature (Hokusai shashin gafu), published in 1814, is one of Katsushika Hokusai's important early instructional and aesthetic publications and appears in the same year as the first volume of the Hokusai Manga. The album presents a series of carefully composed studies of birds, animals, plants, figures and landscapes intended to demonstrate the artist's principle of drawing directly from nature, an idea captured in the term shashin within the title. As a publication it belongs to the broader field of Edo ukiyo-e woodblock printing, drawing on the same carvers, printers and publishers who produced single-sheet prints. The album was issued in a more refined form than the densely populated pages of the Manga, with one or two motifs per page allowed to breathe against the white of the paper. The Harvard Art Museums preserve a copy of the album, and their wider holdings of Hokusai illustrated books support detailed comparative study. As a ukiyo-e print album, the work documents the moment at which Hokusai began to consolidate his pedagogical identity as a master draughtsman addressing himself to a national audience of students and amateur painters. The Hokusai shashin gafu is therefore an important document for understanding both his technical achievements and his self-presentation as a teacher in the second decade of the nineteenth century.