Under The Wave

Under The Wave is the abbreviated title of Kanagawa Oki Nami Ura, Under the Wave off Kanagawa, the print universally known in English as the Great Wave and the single most reproduced image in the history of the Japanese woodblock. The design is the opening plate of Katsushika Hokusai's series Fugaku Sanjurokkei, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, issued in Edo by Nishimuraya Yohachi (Eijudo) between roughly 1830 and 1833. The present sheet is offered on Artsy at https://www.artsy.net/artwork/katsushika-hokusai-under-the-wave with a 2024 date that should be understood as a contemporary recarved or reprinted impression rather than an Edo-period strike; the underlying design is Hokusai's. The composition stacks three oshiokuri-bune transport boats, fast vessels used to carry fish from Boso to the Edo market, against the curl of a vast wave whose claw-like spray frames the small distant cone of Mount Fuji at the horizon. The reading the design rewards is the inversion of expected scale: the wave swallows the foreground while the mountain remains untouched at the visual center, the sailors bowed to their oars and the season ambiguous. The Prussian blue ground, bero-ai, that holds the water and sky had been newly available to Edo publishers, and Hokusai's appetite for the imported pigment shapes the design from its first impressions. Hokusai (1760-1849) was in his seventies when the series appeared, the culmination of a six-decade career that had moved through actor portraits within the Katsukawa school under his teacher Shunsho, beauties, surimono commissions, the illustrated manga sketch volumes, and many shorter landscape projects before settling on the Fuji subject as the vehicle for his late mastery. The image circulated through Paris in the 1860s through dealers including Tadamasa Hayashi and Siegfried Bing, and entered the visual vocabulary of European modernism through painters from James McNeill Whistler and Claude Monet to Vincent van Gogh and Edgar Degas. Confirmed Edo-period impressions of the Great Wave are preserved at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the British Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Sumida Hokusai Museum in the artist's home district, and the Tokyo National Museum, the institutions whose holdings now anchor the global study of the design.