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葛飾北斎（かつしか ほくさい）は、江戸本所生まれの浮世絵師。90年の生涯にわたり描き続け、『冨嶽三十六景』の「神奈川沖浪裏」などで世界的に知られる。
Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) was born on September 23, 1760, in the Honjo district of Edo (present-day Sumida, Tokyo). By his own account he had a habit of sketching objects from the age of six. At nineteen he apprenticed under the ukiyo-e master Katsukawa Shunsho, and over his lifetime he voraciously absorbed techniques from the Kano and Rinpa schools as well as Western painting methods. He changed his art name more than thirty times and moved house 93 times, living a life almost entirely indifferent to anything but drawing.
After turning seventy, he began his best-known series, “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji,” which includes two of the most recognized images in world art: “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” and “Fine Wind, Clear Morning” (the “Red Fuji”). The dynamic, almost living rendering of the wave in “The Great Wave” later influenced Impressionist painters such as Van Gogh and Monet, making Hokusai a central figure in the 19th-century European fascination with Japanese art known as Japonisme.
Hokusai kept painting until the day he died, on April 18, 1849, at the age of ninety. In 1998, LIFE magazine named him the only Japanese person among “the 100 most important people of the last 1,000 years.” His lifelong, unrelenting drive to keep improving continues to inspire people across generations and borders.