Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Kajikazawa in Kai Province, 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
Kajikazawa in Kai Province
Katsushika Hokusai · c. 1830–32
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
A fisherman stands on a rock spur over the Fuji river with his lines running down into the water, and the whole print is built out of that one triangle. His body and the rock make a shape that repeats Fuji's silhouette behind him, and the fishing lines extend the triangle downward into the mist. A child crouches beside him, easy to miss. The palette is almost entirely blue — Prussian blue again, in at least four strengths from the near-black of the rock to the palest wash in the sky — with the ochre of the figure and the net as the only warm notes. Hokusai was in his seventies when he made this series and had been working for fifty years. The economy here, where one geometric idea carries the entire image, is what that experience bought.