Hokusai's Great Wave read part by part, each opening other prints from the same series.
The same content as the picture, as text: every part and what it says when you open it.
One of three oshiokuri-bune, fast boats that rowed fresh fish into Edo. Its crew lie flat against the gunwales as the wave rises over them.
The middle boat, riding the slope of a wave with Fuji framed above its bow.
The nearest boat, about to be lifted by the swell in the foreground.
Small, still and snow-capped in the trough of the wave - the subject of the whole series, which is why it is here at all.
The breaking crest ends in claw-like fingers of foam, and the spray falling from it reads like snow - so the wave seems about to fall on Fuji's snow as well as on the boats.
Much of the blue is Prussian blue, a synthetic pigment newly affordable in Japan when this was printed. Deep, stable and new, it is part of why the series sold so well.
The rectangle top left names the series and the print: Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, and Under the Wave off Kanagawa.
Signed 'Hokusai aratame Iitsu hitsu' - from the brush of Hokusai, now called Iitsu. He changed his name dozens of times, and was about seventy when he made this.
The picture under this example is the museum's photograph of the print. Katsushika Hokusai, Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave), from Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, ca. 1830–32. Woodblock print, ink and colour on paper. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929 (JP1847). Photograph CC0, via the Met's Open Access programme.
Paintings and photographs read detail by detail, with galleries and film.
