Kajikazawa in Kai Province
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave), Katsushika Hokusai, c. 1830–32. Woodblock print; ink and colour on paper, 25.7 × 37.9 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain (Met Open Access, CC0).
The image on this page is a studio placeholder, not the painting. The open-access file from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York replaces it when the gallery's image pipeline runs — we would rather show you a card that says so than a reproduction we have not verified.
Ukiyo-e
Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave)
Katsushika Hokusai · c. 1830–32
- Medium
- Woodblock print; ink and colour on paper
- Dimensions
- 25.7 × 37.9 cm
- Held by
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
- Licence
- Public domain (Met Open Access, CC0)
- Movement
- Ukiyo-e
- Country
- Japan
The painter
Katsushika Hokusai
Hokusai worked for seventy years, used more than thirty art names, and produced something in the order of thirty thousand designs — prints, paintings, book illustrations and the fifteen volumes of sketches known as the Manga, which were studies for students rather than anything resembling modern comics. The work everyone knows, the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, was begun when he was around seventy. He was explicit about considering himself a late developer: in a famous postscript he wrote that nothing he produced before seventy was worth counting, and that if he were granted until ninety he might finally understand how to draw.
Nearby
Related works
Fine Wind, Clear Morning (Red Fuji)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
What to look at
The first print in Hokusai's series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, and the mountain is the small white triangle in the middle distance, not the wave. Once you see that, the composition reorganises: the wave's crest and Fuji's peak rhyme, and the wave is temporarily the larger of the two from where the viewer stands. There are three boats. They are oshiokuri-bune, fast boats used to run fresh fish to market, and there are eight rowers crouched in each, which most reproductions crop or lose. The deep blue is Prussian blue, a synthetic pigment newly imported into Japan and cheap enough to use in quantity; it is the reason this series looks different from earlier ukiyo-e. Thousands of impressions were pulled from the blocks, and because the blocks wore down, early impressions have crisper outlines than late ones.