Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) was the great master of Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, endlessly inventive across a seventy-year career. His Great Wave off Kanagawa is perhaps the most recognised image in all of Asian art.
This is not a painting. It is a print — one of hundreds pulled from the same set of carved cherry-wood blocks and sold in Edo for about the price of a bowl of noodles. Impressions survive in New York, London, Chicago, Tokyo. None of them is the original in the sense we mean with…
Start with the correction, because almost every article gets it wrong: the wave is not a tsunami. It is a wind-driven wave, the kind that builds in open water during a storm. A 2009 study in the Royal Society’s Notes and Records worked through the fluid dynamics and concluded that Hokusai drew a plunging breaker…