These three women are not named on the print, because naming them had just been made illegal. In 1793 the shogunate banned the identification of women on woodblock prints — the argument being that it turned them into celebrities and encouraged vanity. Utamaro found a way round it. He identified each woman by her family…
Van Gogh copied this print in oil, and while doing so made a mistake that tells you everything about what Japonisme actually was. He framed his version with a border of Japanese characters copied from other prints in his collection. They do not mean anything coherent. Fragments of advertisements and unrelated titles, transcribed by a…
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…