Hokusai's 'The Great Wave off Kanagawa'

Date

c. 1831

Category

Culture, arts & philosophy

Region

Edo (Tokyo), Japan (East Asia)

Era

Modern

Significance

Around 1831, during Japan's late Edo period, the ukiyo-e artist Katsushika Hokusai produced 'The Great Wave off Kanagawa' (Kanagawa-oki nami-ura), the first print in his woodblock series 'Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji'.

The image of a towering, claw-like wave dwarfing fishing boats with a distant Mount Fuji became one of the most reproduced artworks in world history. Hokusai was among the first Japanese printmakers to use the imported synthetic pigment Prussian blue, which gave the series its distinctive vividness and durability. When Japan opened to international trade after the 1850s, such prints flooded into Europe and ignited a craze for Japanese art known as Japonisme. Their flat planes of colour, asymmetrical compositions, and bold cropping deeply influenced Western artists including Monet, Degas, Van Gogh, and the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. 'The Great Wave' stands as a landmark of cross-cultural artistic exchange and a defining image of Japanese visual culture.

Empires active in c. 1831

• Russian Empire
  1721 CE – 1917 CE
• British Empire
  1583 CE – 1997 CE
• Qing Dynasty
  1636 CE – 1912 CE
• French Colonial Empire (Second)
  1830 CE – 1962 CE
• Spanish Empire
  1492 CE – 1976 CE
• Portuguese Empire
  1415 CE – 1999 CE

Related culture, arts & philosophy events

• Premiere of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony
  7 May 1824
• The Great Exhibition opens at the Crystal Palace
  1 May - 15 October 1851
• First Impressionist Exhibition opens in Paris
  15 April 1874
• Nietzsche's 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra'
  1883–1885
• Freud publishes 'The Interpretation of Dreams'
  1900 (completed 1899)
• Rabindranath Tagore wins the Nobel Prize in Literature
  1913

Further reading

The Story of Art

The wider story

The Story of Art

E. H. Gombrich

The best-selling art history ever written, from cave paintings to the modern age.

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