The Great Wave off Kanagawa

History

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.