Good morning.

Today, a wave that three fishing boats can’t outrun… drawn by a printmaker who believed he was only just getting good, in his seventies.

Let’s begin.

The Wave an Old Man Chased for Fifty Years

Katsushika Hokusai—“The Great Wave off Kanagawa”

Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) was born in Edo, the city we now call Tokyo. He had been a working printmaker since his teens, but he later dismissed almost everything he made before the age of seventy as not worth discussing.

This print opens a series he called Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. It sold so well that he ended up adding ten more, forty-six views in total. For the water, he used Prussian blue, a synthetic pigment newly imported from Europe, at a scale no Japanese printmaker had tried before.

This is the print itself, one of roughly a hundred first-edition copies known to survive today.

Katsushika Hokusai, “Under the Wave off Kanagawa,” c. 1831. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Three long, narrow fishing boats sit under a towering, claw-shaped wave. Mount Fuji waits small and calm in the distance, almost swallowed by its own painting. That wave is wind-driven, not a tsunami, no matter how often the internet insists otherwise. Hokusai had studied real waves off the coast at Kanagawa for decades before he ever drew this one.

By this point in his life, Hokusai had taken to signing his work “Old Man Crazy to Paint.” He believed he was only now, past seventy, starting to understand how animals, birds, and plants were actually built.

I assumed, before I saw one of the surviving prints in person, that it would be enormous. It is roughly the size of a placemat. Everyone I know who has seen the original says some version of the same thing: it looks nothing like the mug.

The print crossed into Europe within decades and reshaped Western art on contact. Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) wrote that Hokusai’s waves were “claws, the boat is caught in them.” Claude Monet collected Hokusai prints and hung them in his own house. The wider movement this sparked, European artists borrowing Japanese composition and color, became known as Japonisme.

Hokusai kept working until he died in 1849, at eighty-nine… and on his deathbed, he reportedly asked heaven for just five more years, so he might finally become a real painter.

He never got those five years. He got two centuries instead, and counting.

Three Things Worth Knowing

Connoisseur’s Diary

Worth Seeing This Week

The British Museum holds one of the finest surviving impressions of “The Great Wave,” in its Japanese galleries.

Where: Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DG.  Tickets: general admission is free, every day the museum is open.  Insider tip: the original woodblock print is light-sensitive and only shown in rotation, then rested in the dark for years at a stretch; check the museum’s Japan gallery listing before you go, in case a facsimile is on view instead that week.  Check the Japan galleries at britishmuseum.org →

Worth Reading

Hokusai’s Great Wave: Biography of a Global Icon — Christine Guth (2015). A single-print biography, tracing how one woodblock became a tote bag, a tsunami warning sign, and an emoji.

Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave — Timothy Clark (2017). The catalogue behind the British Museum’s landmark retrospective, focused on Hokusai’s prolific final thirty years.

Japanese Prints: The Collection of Vincent van Gogh — Louis van Tilborgh (2019). Van Gogh bought over six hundred Japanese prints and pinned them to his studio wall; this book shows exactly which ones, and what he took from them.

Test Your Knowledge

If the links above don’t respond in your email app, just reply with your answers—I’ll write back.

That’s all for today.

Tomorrow, we leave the gallery for something with a curtain call.

In good taste,

Charles T. Mayfair

Editor, Connoisseur Daily