Shortly before he was to draw his masterwork The Great Wave, Hokusai seemed to have lost his way.
Experts on the Japanese draughtsman assumed he was having a fallow period, weathering the shocks of a minor stroke and his wife’s death while having to scrape together money to cover his errant grandson’s gambling.
Historians at the British Museum are now rewriting Hokusai’s history after discovering that he was working on a magnum opus that never became public. His ambitious project is coming to light after the museum purchased 103 drawings hidden from scholars because they had disappeared into an unknown private collection in France 70 years ago.
The drawings, for which the museum paid £270,000 with assistance from the charity Art Fund, are part
