Puzzle No. 8: When?

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.

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