SSAT Practice Test 3

¹When Katsushika Hokusai began the print series that would make him famous around the world, he was about seventy years old, an age at which most artists of his time were content to repeat what had already made them successful. Hokusai was not. Over his long career he changed his artistic name dozens of times, as if each new name let him start over, and he moved house so often that friends could barely keep track of him.

²The series, Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, was published in the early 1830s as color woodblock prints. Such prints were not treated as precious objects in their day. Carved by craftsmen from the artist's drawings and printed in large numbers, they were sold cheaply to ordinary city dwellers, much as posters are today. A buyer might pin one up at home and replace it when a newer design caught the eye.

³What set Hokusai's series apart was not its subject, since Fuji had been pictured countless times, but its approach. In many of the views the mountain is almost an afterthought: a small cone glimpsed beyond barrel makers, travelers, and farmers at work. In the most famous image, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, an enormous wave curls over three fishing boats, while Fuji sits low in the distance, seemingly no larger than the spray. The viewer must look twice to find it.

⁴The prints also made bold use of Prussian blue, a synthetic pigment first made in Europe. It held its color far better than the plant-based blues that Japanese printers had relied on, which tended to fade, and its deep tones gave the water and sky a new intensity.

⁵Hokusai himself seemed unimpressed by what he had done. In his seventies he wrote that nothing he had produced before the age of seventy was worth noticing, and that if he lived past one hundred, every dot and line he drew might finally come alive. He died in his late eighties, still working.