Untitled by Katsushika Hokusai

This is an untitled ink drawing by Katsushika Hokusai, made in 19th-century Japan. It shows a traveler in a straw raincoat on a rearing horse, caught in a storm as two wild boars charge past. The whole violent scene is conjured almost entirely from line, wash, and bare paper, a trick Hokusai mastered in his old age.

Slow the video and look at the upper right. The gale itself is only a few calligraphic sweeps of pale ink. The boar’s tusks are three sharp strokes. Beneath the horse, there is no drawn ground: the figures float on empty paper, which reads as driving rain and mud. Everything solid is implied, never filled.

Hokusai was in his eighties when he made this. He famously said he was only beginning to understand drawing at seventy, and that if he lived to 110, every dot would be alive. This sheet feels like that late fluency: rapid, confident, and completely economical. It may have been a working sketch, there’s even a faint extra face study tucked into the upper-left margin.

The drawing is now held in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of the Havemeyer bequest. It remains untitled, a private experiment by an artist who was still chasing the line.