Explore the Legacy of this artwork.
The first volume of 'Manga' (Defined by Hokusai as 'Brush gone wild'), was an art instruction book published to aid his troubled finances.  Shortly after he removed the text and republished it.  The Manga show a dedication to artistic realism in the portrayal of people and the natural world. The work was an immediate success, and the subsequent volumes soon followed. The work became known to the West after Dutch-employed German physicist Philipp Franz von Siebold took lithographs of some of the sketches to Europe where they appeared in his influential book on Japan, Nippon: Archiv Zur Beschreibung von Japon in 1832. The work began to circulate in the West soon after Matthew C. Perry's entry into Japan in 1854.
Manga Matthew C. Perry Hokusai Japan realism sketches Philipp Franz von Siebold