Author
19th Century
The Great Wave off Kanagawa
The Great Wave off Kanagawa is a woodblock print by the Japanese ukiyo-e artist Hokusai (1760–1849), created in late 1831 during the Edo period of Japanese history. The print depicts three boats moving through a storm-tossed sea, with a large, cresting wave forming a spiral in the centre over the boats and Mount Fuji in the background.
Intro source: Wikipedia (EN)
The work matters for its audacious composition and for the way Japanese print culture reshaped European modernism and graphic design.
Highlights
Surprising facts & legends
Short but striking stories around the work — the things that make it come alive.
Interesting facts
The story around the work
Interesting facts & legends
- Hokusai made this print when he was around 70 years old — he'd been a working artist for decades before the wave became his most famous image.
- The print was published in a run of roughly 5,000 to 8,000 copies, making it mass-produced by the standards of 1831 Edo; a single original impression today sells at auction for over a million dollars.
- Mount Fuji isn't a background detail — it's technically the subject of the whole series (Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji), and the wave is deliberately dwarfing it, which was quietly subversive for the period.
- The blue Hokusai used — a vivid synthetic pigment called Prussian blue, imported into Japan from Europe around 1820 — was brand new technology at the time, and it's what gives the print that unnaturally electric look.
- Debussy kept a copy of The Great Wave on his piano while composing La Mer in 1903–1905; he reportedly used the image as a reference mood board for the piece.
- The boats in the foreground are oshiokuri-bune, fast courier vessels that carried live fish to Edo markets — the men in them aren't fishermen, they're delivery workers, and the wave is about to end their shift permanently.
Estimated value
What it is worth today
The Great Wave is a woodblock print, and original impressions are held in museums worldwide; the finest examples reach $1.5–2.8 million at auction.
More details Open the extended reading, official sources, and visual context around the work
Historical context
The Great Wave off Kanagawa inside its era
The sheet belongs to the series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji and became the most recognizable image of Japanese art worldwide.
The Great Wave off Kanagawa is a woodblock print by the Japanese ukiyo-e artist Hokusai (1760–1849), created in late 1831 during the Edo period of Japanese history. The print depicts three boats moving through a storm-tossed sea, with a large, cresting wave forming a spiral in the centre over the boats and Mount Fuji in the background. The location in The Met, New York matters too, because it frames the work not as an isolated icon but as part of a living institutional history.
Path to recognition
How the work became widely known
It is one of the rare cases in which a print escaped the museum frame and became a global visual icon.
Value
Why the work matters now
The work matters for its audacious composition and for the way Japanese print culture reshaped European modernism and graphic design.
Connections and legacy
How to read the work more broadly
The Great Wave off Kanagawa ignited European Japonisme and shaped Impressionism, Art Nouveau and even music — today it is perhaps the most reproduced image in all of Japanese art.
Official sources
Where to verify the institutional context
There is no institution link in the registry for this work yet, but the long-form reading below is already composed from the artwork’s history, value, and museum context.
Visual context
Related images and nearby entry points
What to look at
Three entry points into the work
Even a very famous artwork opens more fully when the viewer knows where to look for tension, meaning, and compositional focus.
- Compare the enormous wave with tiny Mount Fuji on the horizon.
- Notice how the crest almost turns into claws or snow-like foam.
- Follow the contrast between the mountain’s stillness and the fragility of the boats.
More by the artist
More works: Katsushika Hokusai
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Continue the exhibition
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