The Great Wave off Kanagawa

How to look at it

Follow the crest from the left until it curls into claws of foam. Then drop into the trough: three boats with their rowers bent low. Only then find the mountain, small and snow capped, sitting inside the hollow of the wave. Hokusai makes the most famous peak in Japan the smallest thing in its own series title.

Why this one

The blue was new. The publisher advertised the series for the New Year of 1831 with Prussian blue, a pigment newly available to the print market. The Met reports that the printers mixed it with indigo for the dark stripes, then laid pure Prussian blue over them in the hollow of the wave, so the blue deepens without going dull.

Fuji is the smallest thing here. In a series named for the mountain, the sacred peak is a tiny cone in the trough, framed by the wave and echoing its shape.

A low horizon. The eye level sits down among the boats, so the wave towers over them and over you.

Made to travel. Woodblock prints were made in editions, and the British Museum has located 111 surviving impressions. Debussy kept a framed Great Wave in his studio and chose a cropped detail of it for the cover of the first edition of La Mer in 1905 (per The Met). Hokusai was about seventy when he made it.

This sheet

Woodblock print, ink and color on paper, 25.7 × 37.9 cm (10⅛ × 14 15/16 in). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, accession JP1847, H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929. Woodblock prints were made in editions, so museums around the world hold different impressions. This is The Met’s.

Fact gap. There is no single original Great Wave: it is a woodblock print made in editions, and The Met alone holds four impressions. This print reproduces The Met’s JP1847, the Havemeyer sheet. See which impression you’re looking at.

Sizes vs the original

The real sheet is smaller than most people picture, about the size of a magazine spread. Our prints keep its long, low shape:

• 12×18 a little larger than the sheet itself, for a desk or hallway
• 20×30 the living room size, the wave at full voice
• 24×36 for the wall that can take the whole sea

Paper & ship

Archival matte fine art paper, no bleed. We print from the museum open access file with no remastered color, so the paper tone and the soft wear of a sheet printed around 1830–32 stay visible. Made to order, rolled in a tube. Pale wood or black hairline frames both work.

Quick answers

Is this an original woodblock print? No. It is an archival reproduction of The Met’s impression.

Is the image public domain? Yes. The Met marks it public domain under its Open Access program (CC0). The museum does not endorse this shop.