The Great Wave off Kanagawa

A giant wave curls across the paper, its foam splitting into tiny claws that seem ready to grab the three fishing boats caught below. Katsushika Hokusai made this woodblock print around 1831, carving the design into wood so many copies could be pressed onto paper and sold cheaply. Far in the background, small and still, sits Mount Fuji, almost lost behind the crashing water. That quiet mountain is actually the point of the whole picture, since this print belongs to a series called Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.

The bold blue that makes this scene pop came from Prussian blue, a pigment freshly arrived from Europe at the time. Hokusai used it to freeze the wave at the exact moment before it slams down, giving the whole thing a sense of held breath. He created this in his seventies, a reminder that great ideas do not always come early.

Beyond Japan, the print found fans in painters and even the composer Claude Debussy, who was moved by its rhythm and power. It has been copied onto mugs, posters, and just about everything else, but the original still holds a force that all those reproductions never quite catch.