A wave about to break
Three boats are caught beneath a huge cresting wave off Kanagawa, in what is now Tokyo Bay. Mount Fuji sits small in the distance, framed in the gap beneath the wave's curve.
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The Great Wave off Kanagawa
Katsushika Hokusai · c. 1831
woodblock print
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Three boats sit beneath a breaking wave while Mount Fuji appears small in the distance. Hokusai designed the print around 1830–31 for Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, using Prussian blue, a pigment newly imported to Japan.
Details
Find Fuji in the opening beneath the wave. Its stillness sets a different scale of time beside the turbulent water. The deep blue holds mountain, sea and sky within the same printed palette.
In its time
c. 1831
Books from this period
Where it hangs
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
In context
Wave against mountain
Hokusai sets the wave's violence against Fuji's stillness. Some read the contrast through the old idea of yin and yang, two opposites that complete each other.
The story
1830. Hokusai made this view of a wave off Kanagawa, part of a new series, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, printed in the newly imported pigment Prussian blue.
Later in the century, the print reached Europe and went on to influence Western artists and musicians in turn.
Prussian blue
A manufactured blue pigment newly imported to Japan when Hokusai used it here. Its deep colour shapes the wave and sky across this woodblock print.
Also used in a Reading Room mood.