Three Styles of Drawing (Santai gafu)

Published in 1816, the Three Styles of Drawing, or Santai gafu, is one of Katsushika Hokusai's many illustrated picture books and serves as a manual demonstrating distinct manners of representation: a careful and formal style, an abbreviated cursive style, and an intermediate mode between them. Throughout the volume, Hokusai applies these three approaches to figures, landscapes, plants, animals, and architectural subjects, allowing the reader to see how a single motif can be transformed by handling. As an Edo ukiyo-e print project, the book is part of a substantial tradition of pictorial manuals through which Hokusai shared his methods with students, fellow artists, and the broader literate public; the Manga series, begun in 1814, is the best known of these works, but the Santai gafu sits within the same pedagogical impulse. The Victoria and Albert Museum preserves a copy of the book in its collection of Japanese illustrated books. The Santai gafu reveals how seriously Hokusai took the teaching dimension of his career and how confidently he could shift between disciplined draughtsmanship and lively shorthand within a single subject. The book also documents a moment when print publishing in Edo had matured to the point that artists could expect a market for theoretical and instructional works as well as for narrative fiction and visual entertainment. For students of Hokusai's style, the volume is a kind of skeleton key, exposing the underlying principles that govern his diverse output. For modern readers, it provides a remarkable demonstration of how a single artist commanded multiple registers of representation, all in service of an underlying aesthetic vision that united the floating world of Edo with classical Japanese painting traditions.