The Great Wave off Kanagawa

It is a woodblock print, the first of Hokusai's series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, made when he was in his early seventies. A wave curls over three boats while Fuji sits small in the distance. Each colour was printed from its own carved block, and the deep blue is Prussian blue, a pigment newly arrived in Japan from Europe. Thousands of copies were sold cheaply in Edo, today's Tokyo, and about a hundred survive. This one came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1929 with the Havemeyer collection.

Medium

Woodblock print, ink and colour on paper

Size

37.9 x 25.7 cm

Where

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Photo from Wikimedia Commons, public domain.