A Picture With Four Authors

Stand in front of a Hokusai print in a museum and read the label. It will say Hokusai. It will probably not say who carved the blocks, who printed them, or who decided the print should exist, and those three people did most of the work.

A Japanese woodblock print of the ukiyo-e period is made by four roles.

The publisher, the hanmoto, who decided what was made, commissioned the designer, hired the craftsmen, financed the production, set the edition and sold the result. Usually the one in overall control.

The designer, who supplied a drawing. Not a finished coloured picture: typically a black-ink design that became the basis for the key block.

The block cutter, who carved it. This is the step where the line you admire actually acquires its character, because a knife through cherry wood is not a brush on paper and the cutter is interpreting.

The printer, who inked the blocks, registered them against marks so the colours aligned, and pulled the impressions. Colour was negotiated: the printer made proofs, the designer chose, and colour blocks were cut from those choices. A full-colour print could involve up to about ten blocks.

Accounts differ on how much the designer controlled, and some are quite sceptical: one line of scholarship argues that in many cases the designers had very little to do with the details of how the finished print looked. Even on the generous reading, the name on the print belongs to the person who did one of four jobs.

Two details about the Great Wave that complicate the stories usually told about it.

The blue is Prussian blue, a European pigment. It reached East Asia in the eighteenth century and did not come into wide use in mainland Japan until the 1830s, which is exactly when the print was made. So one reason the image looks the way it does is that a new pigment had recently become affordable.

And the printers did not simply swap the exotic new blue for the duller traditional indigo. Analysis of the print finds both, mixed and layered, to build depth that neither gives alone. The story of a technology arriving and replacing what came before is almost never what the evidence shows.

One more correction, which is about us rather than about Japan. The story that ukiyo-e reached Europe as packing material, crumpled around exported ceramics, discovered by astonished Parisians, is largely a myth. Recent scholarship, Julie Nelson Davis in particular, has argued that the prints were thoroughly valued as art in Japan in their own time. The wrapping-paper version flatters a particular idea of European discovery: that nobody local had noticed what was in front of them.

Now put all of this beside the bronze lesson in the making book, and the market book's concern with originals.

Western art has spent two centuries building an apparatus around the artist's hand. A cast made after the sculptor's death is a different kind of object. A workshop painting under a named master is authentic in a way a copy is not. Attribution disputes are about whether a particular person touched a particular surface, and millions of pounds hang on the answer.

Ukiyo-e is simply not organised that way. The line is the cutter's, the colour is a negotiation, the edition size is a commercial decision, and nobody involved thought any of this made the print less of a thing.

Authorship is a convention. Here is a mature, sophisticated, commercially successful tradition that adopted a different one, and the correct conclusion is not that it was careless about authorship. It is that the Western convention is also a choice, and it was made for reasons we could examine if we remembered it was a choice.