The Great Wave
From Ask in Wiki
|
| The Great Wave |
| Katsushika Hokusai, around 1831 |
| colour woodcut |
| 25.4 × 37.1 cm |
| Hakone Museum, Japan |
| 64 worlds greatest paintings |
Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) created this extraordinary picture around 1831. It is known as The Great Wave Off Kanagawa (Fugaku sanjurokkei: Kanagawaoki namiura). It is a fairly small (10 x 15 in or 25.4 x 37.1 cm) colour woodcut. The original is at the Hakone Museum in Japan.
Among his best-known works are the 13-volume sketchbook Manga (which means "Random Sketches" and begun 1814), as well as the series of block prints known as the Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (circa 1826-33). This picture is from that sketchbook.
Japanese artists, as their Chinese counterparts, sign their work with seals (stamps) which make use of Chinese calligraphic characters. Artists were fond of adopting many different names related to a current style. Hokusai used over twenty different names during his career. The inscription above the seal reads: "Sakino Hokusai Iitsu ga"
This picture was adopted for the cover picture of the first edition of "The Sea"("La mer,Trois esquisesymphoniques") by Claude Debussy (1862-1918), published in 1905.
