The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Katsushika Hokusai

The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Katsushika Hokusai

Under the wave

Its Japanese title means “Under the Wave off Kanagawa”, and that is where we are. A huge wave rears up from the left, its crest breaking into curling fingers of foam, and hangs over three long, narrow boats whose rowers crouch low over their oars. Far off, framed in the trough of the wave, sits Mount Fuji, small, snow-capped and perfectly still. A smaller wave in the foreground makes a peak of its own that echoes the mountain. The drama is all in the scale: the sea is enormous, the sacred mountain tiny, and the men in between hold on.

A print, not a painting

It is a colour woodblock print, published around 1830–32 as part of Hokusai’s series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, when he was about seventy. Hokusai drew the design; specialist carvers cut it into wooden blocks, one for each colour, and printers pulled the sheets by hand, so many impressions were made and no two are quite the same. The series made much of Prussian blue, an imported synthetic pigment then newly available in Japan, which gives the sea its depth and the sky its gradation.

Where it hangs

This impression is in the British Museum, London, and the sheet measures 24.6 by 36.8 centimetres; other impressions of the print are held by museums around the world.

About this print

Made from a 3,686-pixel photograph of this impression, enough to print sharply at up to about 24 inches on its longest side.

Sources: British Museum, London · Wikidata Q28913656 · Wikimedia Commons