The Great Wave off Kanagawa


The Great Wave off Kanagawa, also known as The Great Wave or simply The Wave, is a woodblock print by the Japanese ukiyo-e artist Hokusai. It was published sometime between 1829 and 1833 in the late Edo period as the first print in Hokusai's series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. It is Hokusai's most famous work and is often considered the most recognizable work of Japanese art in the world.
The image depicts an enormous wave threatening three boats off the coast in the Sagami Bay while Mount Fuji rises in the background. Sometimes assumed to be a tsunami, the wave is more likely to be a large rogue wave. As with the other prints in the series, it depicts the area and activities around Mount Fuji under varying conditions. Throughout the series are dramatic uses of Berlin blue pigment.

Hokusai

Hokusai began painting when he was six years old. At age twelve, his father sent him to work at a booksellers. At sixteen, he was apprenticed as an engraver and spent three years learning the trade. At the same time he began to produce his own illustrations. At eighteen he was accepted as an apprentice to Katsukawa Shunshō, one of the foremost ukiyo-e artists of the time.
In 1804 he became famous as an artist when, during a festival in Edo, he completed a 240m² painting of a Buddhist monk named Daruma. In 1814, he published the first of fifteen volumes of sketches entitled Manga. His Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, from which The Great Wave comes, was produced from.

Precursors

From the sixteenth century fantastic depictions of waves crashing on rocky shores were painted on folding screens known as "rough seas screens".
Hokusai drew many waves throughout his career; the genesis of the Great Wave can be traced back over thirty years. The combination of wave and mountain was inspired by an oil painting by Shiba Kōkan, an artist strongly influenced by the Western art, particularly Dutch paintings, he had seen at Nagasaki, the only port open to foreigners in this period. Kōkan's A View of Seven-League Beach was executed in middle of 1796 and exhibited publicly at the Atago shrine in Shiba. Hokusai's print Springtime at Enoshima, which he contributed to The Willow Branch poetry anthology published in 1797, is clearly derived from Kōkan's work, although the wave in Hokusai's version rises noticeably higher.
Closer compositionally to the Great Wave are two previous prints by Hokusai: Kanagawa-oki Honmoku no zu and Oshiokuri Hato Tsusen no Zu, Both works have subjects identical to the Great Wave: a sailboat and a rowboat respectively. In both precursor works, the subjects are in the midst of a storm, beneath a great wave that threatens to devour them. An analysis of the differences between the two works and the Great Wave demonstrates the artistic and technical development of Hokusai:

Description

This print is a yoko-e, that is, a landscape format produced to the ōban size, about high by wide.
The composition comprises three main elements: the sea whipped up by a storm, three boats and a mountain. It includes the signature in the upper left-hand corner.

The mountain

The mountain with a snow-capped peak is Mount Fuji, which in Japan is considered sacred and a symbol of national identity, as well as a symbol of beauty. Mount Fuji is an iconic figure in many Japanese representations of famous places, as is the case in Hokusai's series of Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, which opens with the present scene.
The dark color around Mount Fuji seems to indicate that the scene occurs early in the morning, with the sun rising from behind the observer, illuminating the mountain's snowy peak. While cumulonimbus storm clouds seem to be hanging in the sky between the viewer and Mount Fuji, no rain is to be seen either in the foreground scene or on Mount Fuji, which itself appears completely cloudless.

Boats

In the scene there are three :ja:押送船|oshiokuri-bune, fast boats that are used to transport live fish from the Izu and Bōsō peninsulas to the markets of the bay of Edo. As the name of the piece indicates the boats are in Kanagawa prefecture, with Tokyo to the north, Mt Fuji to the northwest, the bay of Sagami to the south and the bay of Tokyo to the east. The boats, oriented to the southeast, are returning to the capital.
There are eight rowers per boat, clinging to their oars. There are two more passengers in the front of each boat, bringing the total number of human figures in the image to thirty. Using the boats as reference, one can approximate the size of the wave: the oshiokuri-bune were generally between long, and noting that Hokusai stretched the vertical scale by 30%, the wave must be between tall.

Sea and waves

The sea dominates the composition as an extending wave about to break. In the moment captured in this image, the wave forms a circle around the center of the design, framing Mount Fuji in the background.
Edmond de Goncourt described the wave in this way:
Andreas Ramos, a writer, notes:

Signature

The Great Wave off Kanagawa has two inscriptions. The first, within a rectangular cartouche in the top-left corner is the series title: "冨嶽三十六景/神奈川冲/浪裏" Fugaku Sanjūrokkei / Kanagawa oki / nami ura, which translates as "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji / Offshore from Kanagawa / Beneath the wave".
The second inscription, to the left, is the artist's signature: 北斎改爲一筆 Hokusai aratame Iitsu hitsu,.
Over his career, Hokusai used more than 30 different names, always beginning a new cycle of works by changing it, and letting his students use the previous name.
In his work Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji he used four distinct signatures, changing it according to the phase of the work: Hokusai aratame Iitsu hitsu, zen Hokusai Iitsu hitsu, Hokusai Iitsu hitsu and zen saki no Hokusai Iitsu hitsu.

Technique

In Japanese woodblock printing the artist's final preparatory sketch is taken to a horishi, or block carver, who glues the thin washi paper to a block of wood, usually cherry, and then carefully carves it away to form a relief of the lines of the image. In the process, the drawing is lost. Finally, with all the necessary blocks, a surishi, or printer, places the printing paper on each block consecutively and rubs the back with a hand-tool known as a baren. There could be a great number of impressions produced, sometimes thousands, before the blocks wore out.
Because of the nature of the production process, the final work was usually the result of a collaboration in which the painter generally did not participate in the production of the prints.
The design uses only a small number of different color blocks. The water is rendered with three shades of blue; the boats are yellow; a dark grey for the sky behind Fuji and on the boat immediately below; a pale grey in the sky above Fuji and on the foreground boat; pink clouds at the top of the image. "The block for these pink clouds seems to have been slightly abraded along parts of the edge to give a subtle gradated effect ".
Even though no law of intellectual property existed in Japan before the Meiji era, there was still a sense of ownership and rights with respect to the blocks from which the prints were produced. Rather than belonging to the artist, the blocks were considered the property of the hanmoto or honya who could do with them as he wished. In some cases the blocks were sold or transferred to other publishers, in which case they became known as kyūhan.

Impressions

Given that the series was very popular when it was produced, printing continued until the woodblocks started to show significant wear. It is likely that the original woodblocks printed around 5,000 copies.
Given that many original impressions have been lost, in wars, earthquakes, fires and other natural disasters, few early impressions survive in which the lines of the woodblocks were still sharp at the time of printing. The remaining prints and subsequent reproductions vary considerably in quality and condition.
Later originals typically have a darker grey sky, and can be identified by a break in the line of the wave behind the boat on the right.
The highest price paid for a Great Wave print in a public sale is $471,000 in March 2019. Hokusai's auction record is nearly $1.5 million as of 2012. The print owned by the British Museum cost £130,000 in 2008 and is only on display for six months every five years to prevent fading.
Outside Japan original impressions of the print are in many Western collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and Claude Monet's home in Giverny, France.

Influence

The print is one of the most reproduced and most instantly recognized artworks in the world.
Following the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan ended a long period of national isolation and became open to imports from the West. In turn, much Japanese art came to Europe and America and quickly gained popularity. The influence of Japanese art on Western culture became known as Japonism. Japanese woodblock prints became a source of inspiration for artists in many genres, particularly the Impressionists. Hokusai was seen as the emblematic Japanese artist and images from his prints and books influenced many different works.
The print is the subjects of two art documentary series :