(Transmitted from the Gods) Hokusai Sketches (Denshin kaishu Hokusai manga), vol.12

(Transmitted from the Gods) Hokusai Sketches (Denshin kaishu Hokusai manga), volume 12, published in 1834, is one of the later instalments of Katsushika Hokusai's vast illustrated compendium known today as the Hokusai Manga. Issued in fifteen volumes between 1814 and 1878, the series collected thousands of pen and brush sketches reproduced as ukiyo-e prints on inexpensive paper, intended as a study manual for students of painting and design. The full title invokes a tradition in which artistic skill is gifted directly from the divine, signalling Hokusai's pride in his own draughtsmanship. Volume 12 continues the encyclopedic ambition of earlier volumes, presenting figures, animals, landscapes, weather effects, mythological creatures and ordinary tradespeople in dense composite pages that mix the comic, the technical and the sublime. The Victoria and Albert Museum preserves a complete or near-complete set of the Hokusai Manga, allowing scholars to study the evolution of the artist's line over more than two decades. As a publication, the manga differs from a single ukiyo-e print in its primary intent as a model book, yet its visual influence on European artists encountering Japanese art in the second half of the nineteenth century was immense. The volumes circulated widely as wrapping for export ceramics and were among the first images of Japanese popular art to reach Paris. Within Edo ukiyo-e, the manga represents Hokusai's commitment to drawing as a universal practice.