MURA · THE COLLECTION · KATSUSHIKA HOKUSAI

The Great Wave off Kanagawa

The Great Wave off Kanagawa is a colour woodblock print by Katsushika Hokusai from his series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, designed in late 1831. Three boats ride a storm-tossed sea beneath a cresting wave, with Fuji small in the distance. This impression, 25.4 by 37.6 cm, belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago.

Katsushika Hokusai · 1830/33 · Color woodblock print; oban · Edo period · story written 25 September 2026

What you are looking at

Three oshiokuri-bune, fast barges used to carry live fish to the markets of Edo, each with eight rowers, caught under a giant wave. Beneath its crest, as the museum notes, a diminutive Mount Fuji appears in the distance. The full title reads Under the Wave off Kanagawa, and the signature in the upper left reads, from the brush of Hokusai, who changed his name to Iitsu. The Art Institute holds three impressions of the design; all are later than the first state.

How it was made

Hokusai was born in 1760 in a district east of Edo and apprenticed at eighteen to the print designer Katsukawa Shunshō. He began Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji around 1830, when he was 70, after years of financial trouble; the series was published by Nishimuraya Yohachi and was so successful that ten further designs were added. A ukiyo-e print was a shared production: the artist drew the design, a carver cut it into woodblocks, one block for each colour, a printer inked and pressed them by hand onto paper, and a publisher financed and sold the result. The drawing itself was destroyed in the carving. The museum points to Hokusai's generous use of the newly affordable Berlin blue, the pigment known in Europe as Prussian blue, imported from Holland and available in Japan in quantity from 1829; it did not fade like the indigo previously used. About 1,000 copies of the Great Wave were printed at first and an estimated 8,000 in all, so that later impressions show wear. Hokusai died in 1849, aged 89.

Where it went

This impression was bought from the New York branch of Yamanaka and Company in December 1905 by Clarence Buckingham, a Chicago collector and trustee of the Art Institute. When he died in 1913 it passed to his sisters Lucy Maud and Kate Sturges Buckingham, and in 1925 Kate gave his collection of thousands of Japanese prints to the museum in his name; it carries the credit line Clarence Buckingham Collection. As of 2022, 113 first-edition impressions of the Great Wave are known worldwide, 35 of them in American museums. The museum lists no current gallery for it.

Why it is in Mura

It belongs to Mura's Japanese Masters collection with a vibrant mood: a curling blue wave over narrow boats.

What you hear in the app

Look beneath the crest of the wave. Far away, almost easy to miss, is a small white mountain. That is Mount Fuji. And, surprisingly, it is the mountain that gives this print its place in a series.

Hokusai began Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji around eighteen thirty, when he was about seventy. He showed the mountain across changing weather, seasons and viewpoints. Here, its stillness meets an enormous burst of movement.

Follow the long boats. Their narrow shapes lead us into the hollow beneath the wave. The people crouch low, while the foam reaches over them in sharp, curling fingers. Beside that movement, Fuji becomes an almost impossibly quiet triangle.

The blue has a history, too. A newly affordable imported pigment, known as Berlin blue, helped Hokusai give these prints their striking colour.

Try looking once more, this time keeping the mountain in view. The wave remains immense. But the picture now has two different kinds of power: the force of a passing moment, and something that seems to outlast it.