In 1830, the sea comes alive under his brush, and a curling blue wave hangs over tiny boats off Kanagawa. That image, later called The Great Wave off Kanagawa, made Katsushika Hokusai famous in Japan and overseas, yet by then he was already an old man still chasing Mount Fuji through paint and paper.

He had been born in Edo, in the Katsushika district, around 31 October 1760, to an artisan family. His childhood name was Tokitarō, and by the age of six he was already painting, perhaps learning from his father, Nakajima Ise, a mirror-maker for the shōgun. At 12 he was sent to a bookshop and lending library, then at 14 to a woodcarver, and at 18 he entered the studio of Katsukawa Shunshō.

Under Shunshō, he took the name Shunrō and published his first prints in 1779, pictures of kabuki actors. But Hokusai would not stay neatly inside the old ukiyo-e habit of courtesans and performers. After Shunshō died in 1793 and Shunkō expelled him from the Katsukawa school, he turned the embarrassment into motion, studying French and Dutch copper engravings and widening his art towards landscapes, plants, animals, and the daily life of ordinary people.

By 1800 he had become Katsushika Hokusai, taking the name from the district of his birth and the North Star he revered in Nichiren Buddhism. He published Famous Sights of the Eastern Capital and Eight Views of Edo, and he gathered students of his own, eventually teaching 50 pupils. In 1804 he astonished Edo with a huge portrait of Daruma, said to measure 200 square metres, brushed with a broom and buckets of ink, and he later won a court contest before Tokugawa Ienari by turning a chicken’s red feet into a river of maple leaves.

His work kept changing with his names. As Taito from 1811, he made the Hokusai Manga, first published in 1814, a flood of thousands of drawings of people, animals, plants, and jokes. Then, in the early 1830s, came Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, created in response to a domestic travel boom and a lifelong devotion to the mountain. It included Red Fuji and the extraordinary Great Wave, and it made him a master of perspective as well as line.

But success did not spare him. A fire destroyed his studio in 1839, and younger artists such as Andō Hiroshige drew the crowd away. At 83 he went to Obuse in Shinano Province, at the invitation of Takai Kozan, and there painted the Masculine Wave and the Feminine Wave. In 1842 and 1843 he made Chinese lions each morning in his so-called daily exorcisms, and in early 1849 he was still painting The Dragon of Smoke Escaping from Mt Fuji and Tiger in the Snow.