Hokusai was born in 1760, the son of a mirror-maker. He lived to the age of eighty-nine years--a long life, crowded with privation that wins our sympathy, and with incessant devotion to his art. When in his seventies, he said: "Ever since the age of six years I have felt the impulse to draw the forms of objects. Up to the age of fifty years I made a great number of drawings; but I am dissatisfied with everything that I created prior to my seventieth year. At the age of seventy-three I, for the first time, began to grasp the true forms and nature of birds, fishes, and plants. It follows that at the age of eighty I shall have made still greater progress; at ninety I shall be able to create all objects; at a hundred I shall certainly have attained to still higher, unimaginable power; and when I finally reach my one hundred and tenth year, every line, every dot will live with an intense life. I invite those who are going to live as long as I to convince themselves whether I shall keep my word. Written at the age of seventy-five years by me, formerly Hokusai, now called the Old Man Mad with Painting." His dying words were: "If the gods had given me only ten years more--only five years more--I could have become a really great painter!" Hokusai's education began as an apprentice to a wood-engraver, a valuable experience for his later career. At the age of eighteen he entered the studio of Shunsho and adopted the name of Shunro. Under this name he produced actors in the orthodox Shunsho manner and melodramatic illustrations for the popular romances of the day. About 1786 a quarrel with Shunsho, due to the pupil's insubordination, led to Hokusai's expulsion, and he thereupon launched out for himself, to begin his long life of poverty and madly enthusiastic labour. His work may be divided roughly into three periods. In the first he followed the traditions of Shunsho, Shunyei, Utamaro, and others of his contemporaries, with great skill but no special originality. His countless book-illustrations of this time were all conceived with lively fancy and vigour; but perhaps the finest works of this, his conventional period, are the very wide prints and surimono in which, against a delicately suggested landscape, move extraordinarily graceful women's figures not unlike those of Utamaro. Already he was a master of drawing; but he kept incessantly at his studies under many teachers, learning, among other things, European perspective from Shiba Kokan. His work was done in this and the following periods under a dozen different names, of which Sori, Kako, Shunro, and Taito are the most important.