Katsushika Hokusai 1760 – 1849) was an incredible artist, painter and printmaker. Born in Edo, Hokusai is best known for the woodblock series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (富嶽三十六景, c. 1831) which includes the internationally iconic image of, The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Hokusai wrote

“From the age of six, I had a passion for copying the form of things and since the age of fifty I have published many drawings, yet of all I drew by my seventieth year there is nothing worth taking into account. At seventy-three years I partly understood the structure of animals, birds, insects and fishes, and the life of grasses and plants. And so, at eighty-six I shall progress further; at ninety I shall even further penetrate their secret meaning, and by one hundred I shall perhaps truly have reached the level of the marvellous and divine. When I am one hundred and ten, each dot, each line will possess a life of its own.”