All the qualities of Japanese art are united in him as in a focus. His work is the encyclopædia of a whole nation, and in his technical qualities he stands by the side of the greatest men in Europe. He is the most attentive observer, a painter of manners as no other has ever been; he takes strict measure of everything, analysing the slightest movements. He draws the solid things of earth, the immovable rocks, the everlasting primæval mountains, and yet follows the changing phenomena of light and shade upon its surface. He has, in the highest degree, that peculiarly Japanese quality of giving tangible expression to the movements of things and living creatures. His men and women gesticulate, his animals run, his birds fly, his reptiles crawl, his fish swim; the leaves on the trees, the water of the rivers, and the sea and the clouds of the sky move gently. He is a magnificent landscape painter, celebrating all the seasons, from blossoming spring to ice-bound winter. In his designs he maps out orchards, fields, and woods, follows the winding course of rivers, summons a fine mist from the sea, sends the waves surging forward, and the billows racing up against the rocks and losing themselves as murmuring rivulets in the sand. But he is also a philosopher and a poet of wide flight, who makes the boldest journeys into the land of dreams. His imagination rises above the work-a-day world, rides upon the chimera, bodies forth a new life, creates monsters, and tells visions of terrible poetry. The deep feeling of the primitive masters revives in him, and he appears as a strange mystic, when he paints his blithe ethereal goddesses, or that old Buddhist who, when banished, came every day across the sea, as the legend tells, to behold once more Fuji, the sacred mountain. [Illustration: _Studio._ OUTAMARO. MOTHER'S LOVE.] Hokusai was born in 1760, amid flowery gardens in a quiet corner of Yeddo, fourteen years after Goya and twelve years after David. His father was purveyor of metallic mirrors to the Court. Hokusai took lessons from an illustrator, but does not seem to have been much known until his fortieth or fiftieth year. In 1810 he first founded an industrial school of art, which attracted numbers of young people. To provide them with a compendium of instruction in drawing he published in 1810 the first volume of his _Mangwa_. From that time he was recognised as the head of a school. When his fame began to spread he changed his residence almost every month to protect himself from troublesome visitors. And just as often did he alter his name. Even that under which he became famous in Europe is only a pseudonym, like "Gavarni": amongst various _noms de guerre_ it was that which he bore the longest and by which he was definitely recognised.