Under the Wave off Kanagawa

Three long boats are caught in the trough of a wave that curls above them like a claw, and the eight rowers flatten themselves against the hulls. These were oshiokuri-bune, fast boats that ran fresh fish from the villages of Sagami Bay up to the markets of Edo, so the men in them were not adventurers but delivery crews having an exceptionally bad morning. Far in the distance, small and snow-capped, sits Mount Fuji. Hokusai has arranged things so the foam scattering off the wave almost mimics the mountain's shape, and for a second you can lose track of which white peak is which.

Hokusai made this around 1831, when he was about seventy, as the opening image of his series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. It is a woodblock print in the ukiyo-e tradition, meaning it was never a one-off treasure but a commercial product, carved and printed in the thousands and sold cheaply, roughly the price of a bowl of noodles. The deep blues come from Prussian blue, a synthetic pigment newly imported from Europe that Japanese publishers had just started using, and it holds its intensity far better than the plant dyes that came before. Hokusai signed himself with one of his many adopted names; he changed them throughout his life and once described himself as an old man crazy about drawing, convinced his real work would only begin at ninety. The print went on to fascinate Van Gogh and helped inspire Debussy's La Mer, which is a strange afterlife for a picture of fishermen hoping not to drown.