Takai Kōzan
Artwork: Demons and Monsters, c. 1870s
Takai Kōzan (1804–1882) was a wealthy sake-brewing merchant of Obuse, a small town in the mountains of Shinano, who painted for love rather than livelihood. In the 1840s he welcomed the elderly Hokusai to Obuse and gave him a studio, and those visits became some of the most productive of the old master's final years.
Kōzan's own favorite subject was the demon world. The work below, an ink drawing of about the 1870s, crowds dozens of yokai down a hanging scroll: reading, drinking, gaming, wrestling, riding, and arguing, with a quiet village and mountains at the top as if nothing were wrong. Where the woodblock artists drew one famous ghost at a time, Kōzan drew the whole underworld at leisure, in the loose, quick brushwork of a man painting what he loved most.