The Old Man Mad About Painting
He once dipped a chicken's feet in red paint, chased it across a blue wash, and presented the result to the shōgun as a landscape of the Tatsuta River with autumn leaves. He moved house ninety-three times. He changed his name thirty. The blue that defines his most famous image — the one now considered the most quintessentially Japanese artwork ever made — was smuggled contraband, invented in Berlin, reverse-engineered in Guangzhou. Katsushika Hokusai died at eighty-eight. His tombstone read: Old Man Mad About Painting.
