The Great Wave off Kanagawa

The story of The Great Wave off Kanagawa

A wave the size of a building curls over three long boats, its crest breaking into fingers of foam, and far behind it, small and perfectly calm, sits Mount Fuji under a gray sky. Hokusai designed it around 1831 as the opening image of his Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, and it was printed by the thousand as a cheap woodblock for the Edo public. Impressions are now in the Metropolitan Museum, the British Museum, and most major collections. What people miss until they look closely are the boatmen: dozens of them, heads down, rowing straight into it.

This is one of the easiest images in the world to live with, which is why it is everywhere. The palette is Prussian blue and white with a little cream and gray, and nothing else, so it sits in almost any room without argument. It is a natural for bathrooms, kitchens, hallways, a boy's or girl's bedroom, and any coastal, Japanese-influenced, minimalist, or nautical interior. The original print is small, about 10 × 15 in, and we offer it up to the Medium at 24.2 × 16 in. That size makes the wave feel like weather. The Petite at 16.6 × 11 in is close to the original scale and works well in a pair with another Hokusai.

Hokusai's Red Fuji is the calm morning from the same series and the classic pairing. Hiroshige's Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Plum Park in Kameido are the two other Japanese prints that Western painters copied most. More from Katsushika Hokusai.

We print from a public-domain photograph of an early museum impression, in our own studio, keeping the soft paper tone and the slight registration wobble of a real woodblock.