Nearly 200 years after Hokusai finished the drawings for this charming illustrated book, this intriguing early Japanese manga is finally being published for the first time – thanks to a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Rediscovered in an old box in the storage rooms of the museum, these Hokusai drawings should have been used to create the woodblocks for printing a continuation of his Manga series. But although scholars have found an advertisement announcing the title, there is no record of the book ever having been produced. Ironically, if the book had actually been published, the drawings would have been destroyed in the woodblock cutting process. Instead, presumably after the decision was made not to publish the book, the drawings were folded and bound together. And so they stayed for nearly two centuries. Author Sarah E. Thompson, Curator of Japanese Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has studied the pages in depth for the first time, annotating them to help readers discover these drawings in Hokusai's own hand for themselves. Although Hokusai is most famous today for the color woodblock prints that he made at the end of his life, he was best known during his own times as a popular book illustrator. Hokusai’s Lost Manga includes the sort of lively, behind-the-scenes sketches of daily life that have made the Hokusai Manga so beloved, with appearances by imaginatively conceived sea creatures, refined flowers, heroes and a variety of craftspeople and laborers. Hokusai fans will find prototypes of many of the people and animals that populate the Japanese master’s later landscape prints. The book also includes an especially interesting series of fabulous astrological deities may reflect Hokusai’s practice of Nichiren Buddhism and his devotion to the Bodhisattva Myōken. Hokusai: The Lost Manga will delight – and intrigue – admirers of Hokusai’s prints as well as Manga collectors.
Artist and printmaker Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) made some of the most iconic images in Japanese art, such as the seminal woodblock print “Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave).” Already influential in Japan, Hokusai inspired a new audience of budding Impressionists and post-Impressionists in the West upon the opening of Japan to Europe shortly after his death.
Sarah E. Thompson is Assistant Curator for Japanese Prints at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Featured image is reproduced from Hokusai’s Lost Manga.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Hyperallergic
Claire Voon
...highlights how driven Hokusai was to record his surroundings, no matter how quotidian; his 'tasty morsels' offer a comprehensive view of Japanese life at the time, from the people to the architecture to religious and cultural customs.
The New York Review of Books
Christopher Benfey
The volume of tasty morsels remained unpublished-until now. The cover displays a partially clothed abalone-diver swooping down on her prey with a knife between her teeth. She seems just the right official greeter for Hokusai's incisive art.
Philadelphia Enquirer
Sarah E. Thompson
The detail throughout is thoroughly wonderful.
The Boston Globe
Nina MacLaughlin
Tucked away in a storage room at the Museum of Fine Arts, a collection of Hokusai’s drawings was recently unearthed and has been published for the first time. Hokusai’s Lost Manga... The handsome volume includes dozens of lively, lovely images, showcasing Hokusai’s skill at capturing movement, in swirling garments, in water, in wind, in bodies in motion at work, spinning pots on a wheel, making paper, washing a horse, trekking up a hill.
Artistsreview
Brian Riley
Hokusai’s Lost Manga includes...a short note explaining each drawing and situating it in the context of early-19th-century Japanese art. From these we discover a wealth of obscure trivia.
What a delight to page through MFA Boston'snew release, presenting for the first time a lost three-volume album of manga drawings by the undisputed master of the Edo period. Most probably titled "Master Iitsu’s Chicken-Rib Picture Book" (ie, "Hokusai's Tasty Morsel"), it was produced around 1825. Each spread of the original is reproduced across a spread of the book, so that we see all of the nuance of the book's design, and also have the opportunity to appreciate the book as rare, historical object. Pictured here are some of the Twenty-eight Lunar Lodgings, a lunar zodiac with no precise Western equivalent, and, below, unusual renderings of daikon radish plants. continue to blog
Hokusai's Lost Manga is an absolute must-have for anyone interested in Hokusai, nineteenth-century Japanese printmaking, historical or contemporary manga, the history of the graphic novel or illustration. It collects three volumes of nineteenth-century drawings by Japanese master painter and printmaker, Hokusai, never published in his lifetime—or since—until now. Pictured here is the cover of Volume 1, entitled "Commerce, Trade, Sericulture, Sea Creatures, Fishing, Plants." Below the title, which is written in archaic "seal script," are the Guardian Kings, a pair of dieties whose images can often be found on either side of the entrance to Buddhist temples. continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 8.25 x 7.75 in. / 248 pgs / 204 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $35.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $47.5 GBP £25.00 ISBN: 9780878468263 PUBLISHER: MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston AVAILABLE: 8/23/2016 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: WORLD
Published by MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Text by Sarah E. Thompson.
Nearly 200 years after Hokusai finished the drawings for this charming illustrated book, this intriguing early Japanese manga is finally being published for the first time – thanks to a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Rediscovered in an old box in the storage rooms of the museum, these Hokusai drawings should have been used to create the woodblocks for printing a continuation of his Manga series. But although scholars have found an advertisement announcing the title, there is no record of the book ever having been produced.
Ironically, if the book had actually been published, the drawings would have been destroyed in the woodblock cutting process. Instead, presumably after the decision was made not to publish the book, the drawings were folded and bound together. And so they stayed for nearly two centuries.
Author Sarah E. Thompson, Curator of Japanese Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has studied the pages in depth for the first time, annotating them to help readers discover these drawings in Hokusai's own hand for themselves.
Although Hokusai is most famous today for the color woodblock prints that he made at the end of his life, he was best known during his own times as a popular book illustrator. Hokusai’s Lost Manga includes the sort of lively, behind-the-scenes sketches of daily life that have made the Hokusai Manga so beloved, with appearances by imaginatively conceived sea creatures, refined flowers, heroes and a variety of craftspeople and laborers. Hokusai fans will find prototypes of many of the people and animals that populate the Japanese master’s later landscape prints. The book also includes an especially interesting series of fabulous astrological deities may reflect Hokusai’s practice of Nichiren Buddhism and his devotion to the Bodhisattva Myōken.
Hokusai: The Lost Manga will delight – and intrigue – admirers of Hokusai’s prints as well as Manga collectors.
Artist and printmaker Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) made some of the most iconic images in Japanese art, such as the seminal woodblock print “Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave).” Already influential in Japan, Hokusai inspired a new audience of budding Impressionists and post-Impressionists in the West upon the opening of Japan to Europe shortly after his death.
Sarah E. Thompson is Assistant Curator for Japanese Prints at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
