Under the Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki nami ura), also known as The Great Wave, from the series "Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjurokkei)"1830/33
A towering wave curls over slender boats packed with rowers, its foaming crest breaking into claw-like fingers, while far beyond, Mount Fuji sits small and still beneath a pale sky, almost like another wave. More about this work
About this work
A towering wave curls over slender boats packed with rowers, its foaming crest breaking into claw-like fingers, while far beyond, Mount Fuji sits small and still beneath a pale sky, almost like another wave. Hokusai designed the print around 1830–32 as part of Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, published in Edo by Nishimuraya Yohachi. It made bold use of Prussian blue, a synthetic pigment newly affordable in Japan, and its play between near and far owes something to European perspective. Thousands of impressions were printed from the woodblocks, and it has become the most widely recognised Japanese image in the world.
Written by Ochre Editions.
What you’re looking at
A color woodblock print of a large crashing wave, looms over two narrow boats full of people. Mt Fuji in the background. There is a faint peach colored sky.
Description from the Art Institute of Chicago.
How it was made
- Colour woodblock print
- In Japan these were a team effort. The artist drew the design, a carver cut it into cherry-wood blocks, one block for each colour, and a printer brushed on the pigment and rubbed each sheet by hand. Full-colour prints of this kind were called nishiki-e, “brocade pictures”, from the 1760s on.
- Ōban
- The standard large Japanese print size, about 38 × 25 cm.
Katsushika Hokusai
Japanese, 1760–1849
Hokusai trained in the studio of the actor-portraitist Katsukawa Shunshō and went on to work under more than thirty names across a career of some seventy years. Alongside book illustration, paintings and the sketch volumes known as Hokusai Manga, he made landscape a leading subject of ukiyo-e with Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, issued around 1830–33, in which the mountain appears from city, coast and countryside, often in the newly imported Prussian blue.
Written by Ochre Editions.
Ukiyo-e
Japanese woodblock prints of the floating world: actors, courtesans, landscapes and the sea.
Rights and the museum’s record
Public domain. The Art Institute of Chicago has dedicated this image to the public domain under CC0, so anyone may copy, adapt and use it, for any purpose, without asking. Our prints and files are reproductions made from the museum’s image; the museum doesn’t endorse them.
- Object number
- 1928.1086
- Credit
- Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago
- Type
- Department
- Arts of Asia
- Licence
- CC0 1.0 Universal
- Museum record
- See it on the museum’s site
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