Waves

This Wikimedia-Commons impression of Uehara Konen's Waves (c. 1910) is the version of the wave subject most widely reproduced in modern survey publications. The composition presents a single curling breaker rising across the picture surface, its crest fragmenting into a fine pattern of foam that the printer has carried across the upper third of the sheet in a precisely registered overlay. The palette is the saturated cobalt-and-jade register Konen favored for his most ambitious marine work, with a thin pale-yellow horizon visible behind the wave's curl suggesting the first light of dawn breaking through low cloud. The print stands at the technical and conceptual peak of Konen's wave studies and is the design most often paired in collector publications with Hokusai's Great Wave as an early-twentieth-century reinterpretation of that subject. The Wikimedia impression descends from the Flickr Commons distribution of the trialsanderrors photographic survey of early Japanese prints and is the version of Konen's wave design that has most influenced subsequent shin-hanga marine work, including aspects of the early sea compositions of Itō Shinsui. The print exemplifies the close attention to a single natural phenomenon that runs through Konen's entire kacho-e oeuvre.