Hokusai and Tesselations | Hacker News Reader

Hokusai and Tesselations

dl.ndl.go.jp

151 pointssrean16 comments

Escher invoking Hokusai in his sixties

"Ideally I would spend a whole year on a freighter watching the waves. If God himself, in honour of my 60th birthday, would give me the strength and the power and the glory, now and forever, to draw a beautiful wave. But no, nothing like that. As soon as I got home I tried it, to no avail. I started spirals instead. That at least gave me something to go on. Drawing waves—those apparently shapeless, chaotic glories—is something I will have to leave to you and your (almost ex-)compatriots."

https://escherinhetpaleis.nl/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fp...

Found a copy of the book on Wikimedia. It was originaly published as a pattern book for kimono textile, then rediscovered in 1986 in a collection at the Boston Museum. Since then art historians in Japan found further prints.

北斎模様画譜 (1884) - Hokusai Pattern Book - https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3ANDL85...

You can download a full resolution pdf of the book at the original posts’s link, which is much better quality than the one on Wikimedia.

I used safari’s built in translate feature to translate the page from Japanese to English, scroll down for download options.

Could you check the URL ? I think something broke during the copy and paste

This seems to work

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3ANDL85...

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:NDL8546...

Oops, I think it's fixed now. (;

They seem to have reversed how Japanese books flip.

There's an ongoing debate as to whether the Alhambra features all 17 plane symmetry groups. It would be interesting to see whether Hokusai did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallpaper_group