Hokusai publishes The Great Wave off Kanagawa

Around 1831 the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, then in his early seventies, created the woodblock print Under the Wave off Kanagawa, the first of his series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. It shows a huge wave about to engulf three fishing boats, with the small, snow-capped Mount Fuji in the background. Printed in thousands of copies using Prussian blue pigment newly imported from Europe, it was cheap and popular. In the 1860s, after Japan opened to the West, such prints influenced Impressionists and Art Nouveau artists, such as Monet, Van Gogh and Debussy, who had a copy for the cover of La Mer.

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