Under the Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki nami ura), also known as The Great Wave, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei)

When it was painted

Around 1830, in Edo, the city we now call Tokyo, Katsushika Hokusai was past seventy. Up to then he was best known for book illustrations and drawing manuals. His Hokusai Manga, a picture handbook whose first volume came out in 1814, kept growing volume after volume and sold widely.

Then an Edo publisher, Nishimuraya Yohachi, launched a new series with him: views of Mount Fuji seen from many places. The publisher advertised the prints as pictures printed in blue. Behind that blue was Prussian blue, a pigment that had only recently arrived from Europe.

The series sold well, and ten more prints were added, for forty-six in all. Until then, the stars of ukiyo-e prints had mostly been kabuki actors and beautiful women. After this series, landscape became a major subject, and a few years later Utagawa Hiroshige followed with his Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido.

Hokusai himself was in no mood to stop. At the end of his 1834 picture book One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, he wrote that he had been drawing since the age of six, but that nothing he made before seventy was worth much. He hoped that by one hundred and ten, every dot and line he drew would be alive. He died in 1849, at eighty-eight.

The wave, meanwhile, crossed the sea. In 1888 Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo comparing these waves to claws, with the boat caught in their grip. In 1905 the wave appeared on the cover of the score of Claude Debussy's orchestral work La Mer. The Met's own impression came to the museum in 1929, as a bequest from Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer.

Look again at the layers of deep and pale blue. A wave printed with a color that had come from Europe went on, a few decades later, to catch the eye of European artists.