Hokusai produced the series *Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji* between 1830 and 1833; *The Great Wave* is the first print in the series. He was in his seventies, had changed his name several times, and was now signing his work as the 'old man mad about painting' (gakyō rōjin).

The composition is built on a few moves. In the left foreground a vast wave curls over; the foam at its edge reaches forward almost like clawing hands. Beneath the wave three narrow fishing boats (oshiokuri-bune) appear; the figures in them lean forward in something like despair. In the background Mount Fuji — the fixed centre of Japanese cosmology — is unexpectedly small. The size contrast between the near, immediate force and the distant, sacred mountain carries the entire dramatic charge of the composition.

The blue pigment is Prussian blue, imported from Germany. Japan had been closed to non-Dutch foreign trade since 1639; Prussian blue arrived in the 1820s via China, and Hokusai's publisher Nishimuraya Yōhachi based the whole series on this new colour. In a sense the picture is not analysing an objective world but the effect of a modern chemical pigment.

The printing technique (nishiki-e, 'brocade printing') worked like this: the painter (Hokusai) made the design; separate craftsmen — carver, printer — cut a wooden block for each colour and printed the colours one by one. *The Great Wave* was originally printed in something like 5,000 impressions; perhaps 100-200 survive today, mostly in major museum collections.

When the image reached Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century the effect was explosive. Monet, Van Gogh, Degas, and Whistler copied directly from Japanese woodblock prints; the flattened composition, asymmetric balance, and refusal of single-point perspective helped set the conditions for Impressionism and what came after. Debussy's *La Mer* (1905) carries a detail of *The Great Wave* on the cover of its first published score — proof that the spread of Japonisme reached well beyond painting.