The master before he was the master. A woman gazes out over her home town — a quiet, wistful scene from 1798, and the name attached to it is one everyone knows: Hokusai. But this is Hokusai decades before the Hokusai. In 1798 he was a working printmaker in his late thirties, still cycling through art-names and styles, still experimenting, an ocean of time away from the Great Wave and the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji that would one day make him the most famous artist Japan ever produced. Here he's simply working in the beauty-portrait tradition, an ambitious craftsman among many.

There's something quietly poignant in the subject — a woman looking out over the place she comes from, that particular ache of the elevated, backward glance. It's a reminder that the giants all had a "before," years of steady, unshowy work laying the ground for the thunderbolt to come.

Portrait of a Woman Overseeing Her Home Town, 1798.