Mount Fuji has always been more than a mountain in Japan. One old explanation of its name reads it as fu-shi, "not dying," and a 10th-century tale tells of an emperor who ordered the elixir of immortality burned on its summit, which is why smoke once rose from the peak. For centuries pilgrims climbed it as a sacred act, and Hokusai belonged to that world of devotion. Under the Wave off Kanagawa, better known as The Great Wave, is the most famous picture of the mountain ever made.
Hokusai made the print around 1830 to 1832, in his early seventies, as part of the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. It is a meditation on scale: fragile human effort, the overwhelming sea, and the eternal mountain that outlasts both. Fuji, the symbol of deathlessness, is almost the smallest thing in it.
The color was a novelty. Hokusai's publishers were early adopters of Prussian blue, a synthetic pigment invented in Berlin and newly available in Japan through trade. It was brighter and more stable than the plant-based blues printers had used before, and the Fuji series showcased it. That blue helped make the series a commercial hit, and thousands of impressions were pulled from the woodblocks. Only a small number survive today, many in museums in Japan, Europe and the United States.
Japanese readers traditionally scan an image from right to left, which makes the wave feel like it's rising up ahead of you rather than crashing down, and some scholars argue Western viewers, reading left to right, experience the print differently from its original audience. The signature reads "from the brush of Hokusai, changing his name to Iitsu," a reminder that he changed his art name dozens of times over his life.
Hokusai was open about his ambition. In a postscript to One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, published a few years later, he wrote that nothing he drew before seventy was worth noticing, that at seventy-three he had begun to grasp the structure of nature, and that if he lived to one hundred and ten every dot and line he drew would be alive. He died at eighty-eight, reportedly wishing for five more years to become a real painter.
The print took on a life far beyond Japan. It inspired Debussy, whose score of La Mer carried the wave on its cover, and it became one of the images that sparked Japonisme among Impressionist painters. Today it may be the most reproduced artwork in the world. Look past its fame, though, and it's still what Hokusai meant: a picture of human effort under an enormous wave, with the deathless mountain waiting quietly on the horizon.
Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa appears on our: