The Great Wave off Kanagawa (神奈川沖浪裏, Kanagawa Oki Nami Ura, "Under a Wave off Kanagawa"), also known as the The Great Wave or simply The Wave, is a woodblock print by the Japanese artist Hokusai. An example of ukiyo-e art, it was published sometime between 1830 and 1833 (during the Edo Period) as the first in Hokusai's series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei (富嶽三十六景), and is his most famous work. It depicts an enormous wave threatening boats near the Japanese prefecture of Kanagawa. While sometimes assumed to be a tsunami, the wave is more likely to be a large okinami or normal ocean wave. As in all the prints in the series, it depicts the area around Mount Fuji under particular conditions, and the mountain itself appears in the background.
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神奈川沖浪裏,北斎 Great Wave, Hokusai Tshirt
Katsushika Hokusai (October or November 1760 – May 10, 1849)was a Japanese artist, ukiyo-e painter and printmaker of the Edo period. In his time, he was Japan's leading expert on Chinese painting. Born in Edo (now Tokyo), Hokusai is best-known as author of the woodblock print series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji ( Fugaku Sanjūroku-kei c. 1831) which includes the internationally recognized print, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, created during the 1820s.
His influences also stretched to his contemporaries in nineteenth century Europe whose new style Art Nouveau, or Jugendstil in Germany, was influenced by him and by Japanese art in general. This was also part of the larger Impressionist movement, with similar themes to Hokusai appearing in Claude Monet andPierre-Auguste Renoir. Hermann Obrist's whiplash motif, or Peitschenhieb, which became seen to exemplify the new movement, is visibly influenced by Hokusai's work.
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