Van Gogh and Japan / The prints that shaped the artist

 

The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London

Van Gogh and Japan: the prints that shaped the artist

Alastair Sooke
11 June 2018

A new exhibition reveals how the artist borrowed techniques from Japanese prints and incorporated them into his portraits, writes Alastair Sooke.

In February 1888, Vincent van Gogh left Paris, where he had been living for a couple of years, and headed for the city of Arles in Provence, in southern France. Exhausted by his time in the metropolis, and eager to recover some self-composure, he was seeking a simpler life that, he hoped, would revitalise both himself and his art. He was also keen to establish a community of artists, and felt excited by the possibilities.

Japanese artist Hokusai inspires new work by Scottish Opera

 

Mihaela Bodlovic

Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai has inspired Scottish Opera's latest work

Japanese artist Hokusai inspires new work by Scottish Opera

Pauline McLean

14 February 2026

Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai created more than 30,000 artworks during an extraordinary nine-decade career. 

One image in particular from two centuries ago - the picture The Great Wave off Kanagawa - has inspired countless works ranging from animations to T-shirts.

Hikikomori artists – how Japan’s extreme recluses find creativity and self‑discovery in isolation

Published: March 2, 2021 Jessica Holtaway

The Japanese word “hikikomori” translates to “pulling inwards”. The term was coined in 1998 by Japanese psychiatrist Professor Tamaki Saito to describe a burgeoning social phenomenon among young people who, feeling the extreme pressures to succeed in their school, work and social lives and fearing failure, decided to withdraw from society. At the time, it was estimated that around a million people were choosing to not leave their homes or interact with others for at least six months, some for years. It is now estimated that around 1.2% of Japan’s population are hikikomori.

Hikikomori: understanding the people who choose to live in extreme isolation

Published: October 29, 2020 

Maki Rooksby, University of Glasgow, Hamish J. McLeod, University of Glasgow, Tadaaki Furuhashi, Nagoya University

It’s pretty normal to sometimes feel like you want to hide away from the stresses and pressures of the outside world. In fact, shortlived periods of withdrawal can reduce acute stress responses and can help us overcome illness and exhaustion. Periods of solace and isolation can also help with important phases of development – such as exploring one’s identity during adolescence. 

 

Interview

‘I’m writing a memoir. It’s a pack of lies’: John Banville on a lifetime in books, bereavement, and the Irish love of words

This article is more than 1 year old

The acclaimed novelist thought he had finished with ‘serious’ books. But now, at 78 and still grieving the loss of his wife, he has a new project on the go

Tim Adams

Sat 30 Nov 2024

I’m going to get a glass of wine, will you have one?” John Banville asks. “I mean, we’re OK, it’s just about noon.” We’re sitting in Banville’s upstairs living room in the harbour village of Howth, just outside Dublin. The low, deep house is in a terrace that rises up behind the seafront. There used to be a good view across the bay from these top windows, he says, but he had to sell the parcel of land across the street and now they are building “a monstrosity” on it. The novelist has lived here since the early 1980s; it is where he has written nearly all of his books – including the 2005 Booker prize winner The Sea. For someone who, it is said, has spent eight to 10 hours a day writing for all of his adult life, Banville insists he is no lover of solitude. “You’re not really alone when you are writing,” he says, “and anyway there has always been a sense of someone else.”

The sea by John Banville / A strange kind of remembering

 

Review

A strange kind of remembering

This article is more than 19 years old

John Banville examines the nature of memory in his Beckettian Booker prize-winner, The Sea, says Nicholas Lezard

The Sea
by John Banville

Nicholas Lezard

Sat 6 May 2006 

It won last year's Booker prize, so does not exactly need the oxygen of publicity: but this almost airless, deliberately stifled book is one of the more interesting titles that the prize has been conferred upon recently.

 

Caught at sea: two men are at the mercy of the ocean. Photograph: Irina Belousa/

Review

Beyond the Sea by Paul Lynch review – poetic novel from an Irish prize winner

A frightening but beautiful tale of two South American fishermen, a storm and hallucinatory violence

M John Harrison

Thursday 5 September 2019

B olivar, sometimes known as Porky, an experienced fisherman whose hands are large and whose plastic sandals are held together with tape, has done something stupid. To make enough money to fix it before his pursuers cut off his ears, he needs to catch fish. His temporary assistant, Hector, an adolescent who turns up in a sweater with a pirate logo and who has only ever fished the local lagoon, is failing to earn his respect. The South American beach where Bolivar keeps his boat is strewn with symbols of their coming voyage, among them an old man whose “songs are sung to the bones of the dead”. A storm is in the offing; Bolivar and Hector should be returning to port, not leaving it.

Classics corner / The sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch XLIsto 191- 4 aug 2013

CLASSICS CORNER

No 191

The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch – review

The 1978 Booker prize-winning novel, featuring a theatre director who retires to the coast to write his memoirs, is a rich and textured study of vanity and self-delusion

Sophia Martelli

Sun 4 Aug 2013

C

harles Arrowby, celebrated theatre director, egomaniac and narrator of Iris Murdoch's 1978 Booker prize-winning novel, has retired to a remote Martello tower on the cliffs by the sea – a body of water by turns calm, raging and boasting the occasional, possibly hallucinated, monster.