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Your galleryUnder the Wave off Kanagawa
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Follow the curl of the great wave out to its claw-like fingers of foam, then drop your eye to the tiny snow-capped Fuji framed in the hollow below.
Hokusai was seventy when he began Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji in 1830, and this is the series’ most famous design: a huge wave curls over long boats and their crouching rowers, while Mount Fuji sits small and far off beneath its crest. The series made landscape a lasting subject for prints, and many of its views use Berlin blue, a newly affordable pigment. This impression was printed after the design’s first state.
Color woodblock print; oban · 25.4 × 37.6 cm · Art Institute of Chicago
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Details and source
- Museum title
- Under the Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki nami ura), also known as The Great Wave, from the series "Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei)"
- Artist
- Katsushika Hokusai
- Date
- 1830/33
- Medium
- Color woodblock print; oban
- Dimensions
- 25.4 × 37.6 cm (10 × 14 3/4 in.)
- Credit line
- Clarence Buckingham Collection
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Art Institute of Chicago
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.