(Transmitted from the Gods) Hokusai Sketches (Denshin kaishu Hokusai manga), vol.14

(Transmitted from the Gods) Hokusai Sketches (Denshin kaishu Hokusai manga), volume 14, is an illustrated woodblock-printed book in the Hokusai manga series, published in 1849 and now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. The manga project ran across fifteen volumes between 1814 and the early 1880s, and volume 14 appeared in the year of Katsushika Hokusai's death, making it one of the last book projects associated with his lifetime.

The Hokusai manga is the most encyclopedic surviving body of brushed sketches in Edo ukiyo-e. Each volume gathers several hundred small drawings of human figures, animals, plants, supernatural beings, landscapes, tools, and architectural details, printed in monochrome ink with subtle pink and grey wash blocks. Volume 14 continues the established editorial format, ranging from samurai in armor and laborers at their trades to demons, fish, and elaborately patterned textile motifs. The drawings are by turns documentary, comic, fantastic, and devotional, conveying both Hokusai's curiosity about the everyday world and his appetite for the mythic.

The manga circulated widely among professional artists, decorators, and amateur draftsmen, who used it as a pattern book for figural composition and as a portable reference manual. Copies travelled with Dutch and other European traders out of Nagasaki in the mid-nineteenth century, where the volumes became one of the most important sources through which Edo ukiyo-e and the language of Japanese drawing reached Western artists associated with Japonisme and Impressionism.

As a ukiyo-e print album produced near the end of Katsushika Hokusai's career, this volume preserves the inventive energy of his brush at every scale, from the tiniest gestural sketch to the fully developed figural study.