Preparatory study for illustration in An Illustrated New Edition of 'The Water Margin' (Shinpen suiko gaden),

late 1820s

late 1820s

Asia, Japan, Tokyo

A drawing attributed to the important nineteenth-century painter and print designer, Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849). The drawing is a preparatory study for an illustration in a multi-volume printed book series, Shinpen suiko gaden 新編水滸画伝 (An Illustrated New Edition of “The Water Margin”). This series, published from 1805 through 1838, was a Japanese adaptation of a classic vernacular Chinese tale of a band of 108 twelfth-century outlaws, and was enormously popular in its day; many copies of the books are held in museum and library collections around the world. The drawing is one of the most well known in Hokusai’s oeuvre, first published in 1896 by Louis Goncourt, when it was owned by the preeminent early collector of Japanese prints, Henri Vever.

The drawing depicts two figures, a hirsute man and elegantly coiffed, if disheveled, woman, engaged in a struggle. Their bodies are twisted and entwined, their hands gripping each other, feet pressing hard into an undelineated ground. The drawing shows only the two figures, isolated against blank paper. The resulting print, a double-page spread in volume 29, places the pair on the right-hand page, in a building that opens to the outdoors and is enframed by a rocky exterior, with three men at the left peering in. Text at the upper right indicates that the scene it illustrates is one in which the honorable bandit leader, Sōkō (Song Jian 宋江), one of the three men, rescues Lady Fujiyo from attack. Hokusai, in other words, explored only the dramatic figure grouping in the drawing, and later included it into a fully developed scene.

The drawing gives insight into Hokusai’s working process. It is executed in various tones of ink on paper applied with a supple brush—the same materials and tool used for both calligraphy and painting in premodern Japan. Light toned ink is used for the underdrawing, which shows Hokusai reworking the complicated positioning of the two figures as they grapple with each other: fluid brush strokes delineate the many slight shifts Hokusai made in the positioning of various body parts and drapery. Atop these layers of light-toned ink is a single application of dark black ink, Hokusai’s final version of the study. A comparison with the printed illustration reveals sight differences throughout in the rendering of the figures, suggesting that this drawing was not the last study before translation into print, but perhaps a stage along the way, close to the final version.

Like many drawings associated with Hokusai (and other premodern Japanese artists), it is unsigned, and so must be designated an attribution. It has, however, been studied closely, and scholarly opinion is that it is as firm an attribution to Hokusai as is possible. It is a compelling work, and compared with other drawings of similar attribution, well executed.