Hokusai and his age

"This profusely illustrated volume, which collects essays by a distinguished roster of specialists in Japanese art, presents a wide range of current scholarship on the Edo artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) and his immediate artistic and literary circles." "Achieving worldwide renown for his dramatic landscape print series such as the Thirty-Six Views of Mouni Fuji, Hokusai also excelled in book illustration, erotica and privately commissioned woodcuts called surimono. Less well known, Hokusai was a highly accomplished and prolific painter who produced not only pictures of courtesans of the pleasure quarters, the normal stock-in-trade of an ukiyo-e artist, but also a prodigious output based on historical and legendary themes. This volume provides new insights into all these diverse aspects of the polyvalent artist's corpus."--BOOK JACKET.