Hokusai Manga
The is a collection of sketches of various subjects by the Japanese artist Hokusai. Subjects of the sketches include landscapes, flora and fauna, everyday life and the supernatural. The word "manga" in the title does not refer to the contemporary story-telling "manga", as the sketches in the work are not connected to each other. Block-printed in three colours (black, gray and pale flesh), the Manga comprise thousands of images in fifteen volumes, the first published in 1814, when the artist was 55. The final three volumes were published posthumously, two of them assembled by their publisher  from previously unpublished material. The final volume was made up of previously published works, some not even by Hokusai, and is not considered authentic by art historians. Publication history. The preface to the first volume of the work, written by , a minor artist of Nagoya, suggests that the publication of the work may be aided by Hokusai's pupils. Part of the preface reads: The final volume is considered spurious by some art historians. Sources of the Manga. The traditional view holds that, after the outburst of production, Hokusai carefully selected and redrew the sketches, arranging them into the patterns  we see today. However, Michener (1958:30-34) argues that the pattern of the images on a particular plate were arranged by the wood carvers and publishers, not by the artist himself. Legacy. The first volume of 'Manga' (Defined by Hokusai as 'Brush gone wild'), was an art instruction book published to aid his troubled finances. Shortly after he removed the text and republished it. The Manga evidence a dedication to artistic realism in portrayal of people and the natural world. The work was an immediate success, and the subsequent volumes soon followed. The work became known to the West since  Philipp Franz von Siebold's lithographed paraphrases of some of the sketches appeared in his "Nippon: Archiv Zur Beschreibung von Japon" in 1831. The work began to circulate in the West soon after Matthew C. Perry's entry into Japan in 1854.