Laura Gascoigne

These rediscovered drawings by Hokusai are extraordinary

They show Japan's most famous artist was a master of the freeze-frame – and a father of photography and modern animation

Master of the freeze-frame: ‘India, river of quicksand. The wind forms waves in the sand’ by Katsushika Hokusai, 1829. Credit: © The Trustees of the British Museum

Lost boys, lost women, lost civilisations, lost causes — the romantic ring of the word ‘lost’ is media gold. So when the British Museum announced last autumn that it had acquired 103 ‘lost’ drawings by Hokusai, one was tempted to take it with a large pinch of salt.

How do 103 drawings by Japan’s most famous artist simply disappear? The answer is, surprisingly easily. Hokusai’s works have never commanded the sorts of prices a draughtsman of his calibre would be expected to fetch, not even in Japan. His art was designed to be affordable: in his day, you could buy a print of ‘The Great Wave’ for the price of a double portion of noodles — and still stretch, if you were lucky, to a side order of ‘A High Wind of Yeijiri’. Even today his prices lag far behind those of equivalent masters. The British Museum picked up this trove of drawings for £270,000, with Art Fund assistance. That wouldn’t buy a line of a Leonardo drawing or half a sketch by Rembrandt. In the art market, low prices mean a low profile. So after these drawings last appeared at auction in Paris in 1948, they slipped from view.

Where have they been all this time? Somebody must know but nobody’s telling. Tim Clark, former head of Japanese art at the British Museum and a Hokusai specialist, was gobsmacked when in October 2019 the dealer Israel Goldman brought the drawings in; he had never heard of them. That they were genuine there was no doubt, as they bore the seal of Henri Vever, the French art-nouveau jeweller and Japanese-art collector whose 8,000 woodblock prints, sold during the first world war to the Japanese industrialist Matsukata, came to form the basis of the Tokyo National Museum’s print collection. Previously dismissed by Japanese officialdom as ephemera, ukiyo-e prints were carried to Edo like coals to Newcastle.

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