The Great Wave is a print, and there are thousands of them.
Hokusai's Great Wave isn't a single painting in one museum. It is a woodblock print from around 1831, made to be sold cheaply, and thousands were printed. Its vivid blue came from Prussian blue, a new imported pigment. Look closely: Mount Fuji sits tiny in the trough.
Under the Wave off Kanagawa, better known as The Great Wave, was designed by Katsushika Hokusai when he was about seventy. It opens his series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, published around 1830–32. The series was a commercial product, meant for a popular market eager for landscape prints as domestic travel boomed.
It was made as a woodblock print. Hokusai drew the design, carvers cut it into wooden blocks, one for each colour, and printers inked and pressed them onto paper by hand. As a result, many impressions exist; estimates suggest thousands were made, and around a hundred or more survive in collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. Early impressions, with crisp lines before the blocks wore down, are the most prized.
Its striking blue came from Prussian blue, a synthetic pigment first made in Berlin in the early 1700s and imported into Japan, where it became affordable in the late 1820s. It was more stable and intense than traditional plant-based blues, and it gave Hokusai's series much of its impact.
The composition is a game of scale. A towering wave with claw-like foam curls over three boats of rowers, while Mount Fuji, Japan's sacred mountain, appears small in the distance, framed by the wave's hollow. When Japanese prints reached Europe in the later 19th century, they fascinated artists including Monet and Van Gogh, and The Great Wave went on to become one of the most reproduced images in the world.
Source: The Met — Under the Wave off Kanagawa · Public domain image (The Met Open Access)
