• News
  • Mar 19, 2021

Opening Up: Friday News Roundup

KATSUSHIKA HOKUSAI

On March 16, a New York sale of Japanese and Korean art at auction house Christie’s achieved world records for painters Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) and Ito Jakuchu (1716–1800). Hokusai’s famous woodblock print, Under the Well of the Great Wave off Kanagawa (c. 1831), and Jakuchu’s undated hanging scroll, Pair of Cranes and the Rising Sun, both sold for USD 1.59 million each, far surpassing their respective high estimates of USD 200,000 and USD 400,000. Hokusai’s previous record was set in 2002 at Sotheby’s Paris for his book Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (1830–35), which sold for USD 1.47 million, while Jakuchu’s handscroll Suibokuyu (The pleasure of ink) (1764), consigned by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, sold for USD 441,600 at Christie’s New York in 2006. 

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