The Great Wave Off Kanagawa: What Hokusai’s Print Is Really Showing

Hokusai’s Great Wave is not really a picture of a wave. It is a picture of Mount Fuji, seen small and far off through a gap in the sea, with three boats full of men caught in between. Most of the Great Wave off Kanagawa meaning lives in that arrangement: the biggest thing in the picture is temporary, the smallest is permanent, and the people are in the middle.

It also helps to know that there is no single Great Wave. It is a woodblock print, made in large numbers for a cheap market, and the impressions that survive are scattered across museums. Here is what the print shows, how it was made, and why the copies differ.

What the title says

The print’s real title is written in the cartouche on the left: Kanagawa oki nami ura, usually translated as Under the Wave off Kanagawa. “The Great Wave” is a nickname (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts). The Metropolitan Museum of Art catalogues its impression as Under the Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki nami ura), also known as The Great Wave, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.

The title is the first clue. It names a place on the water, not a wave and not a mountain. The print puts you out at sea off Kanagawa, looking past the water at Fuji. The Montreal museum places the scene in Tokyo Bay.

The signature on the print reads in translation “From the brush of Hokusai, who changed his name to Iitsu”. It is the only name on the sheet, though carvers, printers and a publisher all worked on it, and Hokusai used more than thirty names in his career (MMFA).

Three boats and a mountain

Look past the wave and count. There are three long, narrow boats, which the Montreal museum identifies as oshiokuri-bune, fast barges taking fresh fish to market in the city. Their crews are bent low over the oars, tossed about by the swell, every man holding on while the crest of the great wave curls over them; the MMFA describes all hands on deck in the struggle to stay afloat.

Then find Fuji. It sits low in the centre, a small cone with a white, snow-covered peak, framed in the trough of the wave. The Art Institute of Chicago describes it as a diminutive Mount Fuji seen in the distance under the crest of a giant wave. Hokusai used Western linear perspective here to push the mountain far back, the MMFA notes, which is part of why it looks so small.

The visual joke is that the foreground wave and the distant mountain are almost the same shape. The smaller swell in front of the boats echoes Fuji’s cone, so the eye keeps comparing them, and the mountain wins by not moving. The Art Fund, which helped the British Museum buy its impression, calls it a witty composition in which Mount Fuji is apparently dwarfed by the wave (Art Fund).

Which way do you read it?

The Montreal museum makes a point that changes the picture once you know it: the composition reads from right to left, as a Japanese viewer would read it. Read that way, you meet the boats first, rowing against the current into a wave that curls down over them, and the mountain stands as a witness at the end. Read left to right, as most Western viewers do by habit, the wave seems to be moving towards you and the boats seem to be fleeing. Try it both ways. The print works either way, but it is a different story each time.

How the print was made, and why it is blue

The Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji series was begun in 1830, when Hokusai was seventy, and it established the landscape print as a popular genre (Art Institute of Chicago). The Montreal museum says the series was successful enough that ten more prints were added to the original thirty-six. The Chicago museum singles out Hokusai’s heavy use of the newly affordable Berlin blue, or Prussian blue, for sky and water.

The blue is the technical story of the Great Wave. According to the MMFA, the print combines traditional plant blues, indigo and dayflower, with imported Berlin blue. The printer laid down the dark vertical stripes first in a mixture of Berlin blue and indigo, then printed the hollow of the wave in Berlin blue over them. Ficke’s 1915 study of Japanese prints (quoted below) describes the care the craft demanded: mixing the tints, charging the blocks, and laying on the paper so that every colour landed in perfect register.

The print was published by Nishimuraya Yohachi of the Eijudō firm, timed for New Year 1831, and it was cheap, roughly the price of a bowl of noodles. The Montreal museum estimates as many as 8,000 copies may have been printed over the years, of which about a hundred originals survive. Prints were ephemera, and most were thrown away.

Why every Great Wave looks different

Because the blocks wore down. Fine lines faded with every pass, and the original woodblocks are now lost. Specialists date surviving impressions by that wear, since the prints were never numbered (MMFA). For later printings the publisher had new blocks cut for the light blue patterns in the sea and the yellow of the boats, and they are cruder than the originals.

Light also changed them after printing. The MMFA notes that the original pink and yellow of the sky have faded on its impression, so the clouds have more or less disappeared. That is why museums show the print for short periods only.

The British Museum example is worth singling out. The Art Fund, which gave £25,000 towards its £130,000 cost in 2008, describes it as one of the top twenty or so surviving impressions in the world, in very good condition, with a woodgrain pattern in the dark sky either side of Fuji that seems to be unique among surviving copies. The museum already held two other, weaker impressions.

What Hokusai thought he was doing

Hokusai was in his seventies when he designed it, and by his own account he considered himself a beginner. Arthur Davison Ficke’s Chats on Japanese Prints, first published in 1915, translates a statement Hokusai wrote at seventy-five:

At the age of seventy-three I, for the first time, began to grasp the true forms and nature of birds, fishes, and plants. It follows that at the age of eighty I shall have made still greater progress; at ninety I shall be able to create all objects; at a hundred I shall certainly have attained to still higher, unimaginable power

Hokusai, quoted in Arthur Davison Ficke, Chats on Japanese Prints (1915), chapter on Hokusai

He signed it, Ficke reports, as “the Old Man Mad with Painting”. Ficke’s description of the Fuji series is still a good summary of what the Great Wave does:

He depicts Fuji, the sacred mountain, in storm and calm, in mist and sunlight—sometimes dominating the colossally empty frame of the design, sometimes receding to a mere speck in the distance

Arthur Davison Ficke, Chats on Japanese Prints (1915)

So what does it mean?

The reading the museums support is a contrast of scales and of time. The wave is enormous and about to be gone. The men are small and in danger. The mountain is smaller still in the picture and will outlast them all; the Montreal museum notes that Hokusai revered Fuji as a spiritual anchor. The print does not tell you whether the boats survive. It holds the moment before you would find out.

Its influence ran the other way across the world. The MMFA records that the print became popular in Europe in the 1860s, that Debussy put it on the cover of the score of La Mer in 1905, and that Rilke’s 1908 poem “The Mountain” is based on it. Van Gogh, writing about Japanese art in a letter translated by Anthony Ludovici, put his finger on what Western painters took from them:

For the Japanese pays no heed to the play of light, and paints flat tones one beside the other—characteristic lines, which seize the movement or the form in a simple manner.

Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of a Post-Impressionist, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici

That idea, flat colour and a strong line in place of light and shadow, is one of the routes from Hokusai to modern painting; see Impressionism vs Post-Impressionism for where it led. For a way of slowing down in front of a print like this, try how to look at a painting, and for poems that do the looking for you, ekphrasis. The sea itself gets its own collection in book quotes about the sea.

Sources

• Metropolitan Museum of Art, Under the Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki nami ura), also known as The Great Wave, JP1847 (record read via the Met’s collection API): metmuseum.org; collection API record
• Art Institute of Chicago, Under the Wave off Kanagawa, 1925.3245: artic.edu
• Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, “Anecdotes on Hokusai’s The Great Wave”: mbam.qc.ca
• Art Fund, “Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave)”, British Museum acquisition, 2008: artfund.org
• Arthur Davison Ficke, Chats on Japanese Prints (1915), Project Gutenberg #46753: gutenberg.org/ebooks/46753
• Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of a Post-Impressionist, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici, Project Gutenberg #40393: gutenberg.org/ebooks/40393