Random Sketches by Hokusai

Catalogued simply as Random Sketches, this album embodies the guiding principle of the whole series: the brush moving without a plan, seizing whatever crosses the mind's eye. The Japanese title's sense of the casual and the improvised is exactly the point — these are studies made for their own sake, unbound by commission or narrative. Across such books Hokusai gathered an astonishing range of subjects with no hierarchy between them: a deity might share a spread with a fishmonger, a study of drapery with a comic grimace. The mid-1830s dating places this album in Hokusai's final, most restless creative decade, when he still signed himself "the old man mad about painting." What unites its scattered contents is not theme but method — rapid, confident observation reduced to the fewest possible lines. It is a portrait of a mind that found everything worth drawing, and drew it all with the same generous attention.