Two quick questions: 1) Who is the most widely recognized, celebrated and popular Japanese artist? and 2) Where can you find the largest collection of Japanese art outside of Japan?

The answer to the first question is Katsushika Hokusai, born in 1760 in the Honjo district of Edo. The answer to the second is the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston, where a wonderful exhibit of Hokusai’s work is currently on display through August 9 of this year.

Hokusai is best known for Under the Wave off Kanagawa, a woodblock print from his series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. Nicknamed The Great Wave, it portrays an enormous white-capped wave rising above cobalt-blue waters with a snow-capped Mt. Fuji in the distant background. If you think you may have seen this iconic work of art somewhere else but haven’t been to the MFA exhibit, you’re probably right. It’s been depicted on billboards, cell phone covers, tattoos and perhaps, most widely, on t-shirts. And, if by chance, you have ever been to Claude Monet’s house in Giverny, France, one of the prints hangs there as well.

A few things struck me as I walked through the Hokusai exhibit on a recent afternoon. One was the tremendous diversity of his work. Along with the woodblock prints, he also produced exquisite paintings, illustrations for books, drawing manuals and even designs for paper toys to be cut out and assembled.

But what I especially enjoyed were his own comments about his development and aspirations as an artist, concluding with this sentence: “So at the age of eighty years I will have made some progress, at ninety I will have penetrated the deepest significance of things, at a hundred I will make real wonders and at a hundred and ten, every point, every line, will have a life of its own.”

Hokusai passed away in 1849 at the age of 89. Admiring his work now, more than 160 years later, my only regret is that he didn’t live to be one hundred and twenty!