The most ambitious lines I have ever read were written by a painter in his seventies.

In 1834, after The Great Wave, Hokusai wrote that nothing he drew before seventy was worthy of notice.

At ninety, he hoped to see further into the underlying principles of things. At a hundred, a divine state in his art. At a hundred and ten, “every dot and every stroke will be as though alive.”

For a master, the masterpiece is a midpoint.

What is the finest work you have seen someone make late in life?

Going deeper

Katsushika Hokusai made Under the Wave off Kanagawa, the print the world calls The Great Wave, around 1830 to 1832, as part of his series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. He was about seventy.

A few years later, in 1834, he wrote a short postscript to the first volume of another book, One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji. By his own count he was seventy-five. He looked back over a lifetime of drawing and judged that nothing before seventy was worthy of notice. Then he looked forward. At eighty, he hoped to have made more progress. At ninety, to see further into the underlying principles of things. At a hundred, a divine state in his art. At a hundred and ten, every dot and every stroke would be alive.

What moves me is the direction of his attention. He had already made the picture the world would still know him by nearly two centuries later, and he was not looking at it. He was looking at the next forty years. The Great Wave was not, to him, a summit to rest on. In his own telling, the work worth noticing had only just begun.

He lived until 1849, to about ninety by the traditional reckoning. On his deathbed he asked for five more years, so that he could become a true artist.

Great work often looks finished to everyone except the person who made it. That is not dissatisfaction. It is appetite: the sense that each piece opens a door to a better one. Masters in every field share it, in science, in engineering, in music and in business. Their most famous work tends to sit somewhere in the middle of the story, because they never stop writing it.

I find that deeply optimistic. It means the best work of the people we admire may still be ahead of them, at any age. It means the masterpiece is never the last word.

For a master, the masterpiece is a midpoint.

Sources

British Museum: Hokusai, old master · Wikipedia: One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji · The Met: Under the Wave off Kanagawa · Ronin Gallery: Hokusai