HOKUSAI

You're probably familiar with the first image, The Great Wave, which the unforgettable Japanese printmaker of the Edo period, now known as Tokyo, Katsushika Hokusai (born 1760-1849).

The Great Wave off Kanagawa (the work's full title), features in a series of woodblock prints called Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (c. 1831) which were created both as a response to the recent travel boom in Asia and as a result of Hokusai's inherent obsession with the volcano and her surroundings.

It was this series which also includes Red Fuji and View of Fuji from a Boat at Ushibori (above) that secured Hokusai's influential place in art history allowing his work to influence artists as far afield as France (Van Gogh was as equally obsessed with the artist as he himself had been with Fuji) and Spain.

In my opinion, Hokusai's images capture an Orient unrivalled elsewhere, so different from those Western Academic oils of mysterious dark-skinned Eastern women falling all over the place in sumptuous arabesques.