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Picture Album Transmitting the Spirit: The Hokusai Drawing Style (Denshin gafu Hokusai gashiki)

Katsushika, Hokusai, 1760-1849 · 1819 · 18 pictures

Picture Album Transmitting the Spirit is a Japanese woodblock instruction book of 1819 by Katsushika Hokusai, offering model drawings for artists and students. Its pages are paired spreads of black-line landscapes, figures, birds and plants printed on pale paper. A designer can take from them the economy of single contour lines, the open white space around small figures, and the way trees, rocks and clouds are reduced to repeated marks.

Katsushika, Hokusai, 1760-1849

Thomas J. Watson Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art · No known copyright restrictions · More from this library