The Great Wave off Kanagawa
A gigantic wave rears up over three boats, while Mount Fuji appears small in the background. The picture belongs to the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.
Prussian blue was a new, imported colour. The foaming crests of the wave look like claws.
Katsushika Hokusai made The Great Wave off Kanagawa around 1830–1832. He was then about seventy years old and had been working as an artist for more than forty years. The picture belongs to the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, published by Nishimuraya Yohachi. The series proved so popular that it was extended by a further ten prints. Hokusai changed his artist’s name many times during his life and at this time signed himself Iitsu, but posterity knows him as Hokusai.
The picture shows a huge wave rising over three long boats with oarsmen. The crest of the wave is about to crash down, and the foam forms finger-like shapes. Further off, in the centre, Mount Fuji appears, small and snow-capped. The mountain’s shape is echoed by a smaller wave in the foreground. The boats were probably carrying fish to market in Edo.
The composition is dramatic. The great wave fills the left part of the picture and forms an arc that frames Fuji. The contrast between the large, moving wave and the small, still mountain lies at the heart of the image. Japanese text is read from right to left, and anyone reading the picture that way sees the boats rushing straight into the wave.
The picture is a colour woodblock print. Hokusai made the drawing, and a block cutter then carved a woodblock for each colour. The printing was done by a printer who laid paper on the blocks and rubbed it. The picture was printed in thousands of impressions, and early impressions are sharper than later ones, made when the blocks had become worn.
The blue was a new pigment, Prussian blue, which was imported into Japan from Europe and became cheaper in the 1820s. It gave a deep, durable blue that Hokusai and other artists used extensively. He was also influenced by European perspective, which he had learned from imported pictures, as can be seen in the way Fuji is placed far in the distance.
The picture has been interpreted as an image of the power of nature and the smallness of humankind, but also of Fuji as an eternal, immovable centre. Fuji was a sacred mountain, and it was believed that it could grant long life. Hokusai himself hoped to live long so that he could perfect his art.
When Japanese woodblock prints spread through Europe in the second half of the 19th century, they influenced many artists, such as Monet and Van Gogh, as well as the composer Debussy, who had a detail of the wave adorn the cover of the score of La Mer. Today impressions are held by many museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the British Museum in London. The wave is perhaps the best-known Japanese image in the world.