The 50 × 40 cm giclée print of Hokusai's Great Wave, unframed, shown flat with its white border

Katsushika Hokusai – Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave), 1830–33 | Giclée Print

50 × 40 cm / 19.7 × 15.7 in — Original size, 1:1
CHF 59.00
Skip to product information
The 50 × 40 cm giclée print of Hokusai's Great Wave, unframed, shown flat with its white border
  • The 50 × 40 cm giclée print of Hokusai's Great Wave, unframed, shown flat with its white border
  • Katsushika Hokusai, Under the Wave off Kanagawa, ca. 1830–33 — the woodblock sheet reproduced whole, the blue wave curling over three boats with Mount Fuji small and calm behind, the pink dawn sky still fresh
  • Hokusai's Great Wave as a 70 × 50 cm giclée print, unframed, hung 25 cm above a 140 cm sideboard
  • Detail at actual print size: the clawed crest of the wave, the woodblock outlines and the paper grain of the 1830s impression
  • The 50 × 40 cm giclée print of Hokusai's Great Wave, unframed, shown flat with its white border
  • Katsushika Hokusai, Under the Wave off Kanagawa, ca. 1830–33 — the woodblock sheet reproduced whole, the blue wave curling over three boats with Mount Fuji small and calm behind, the pink dawn sky still fresh
  • Hokusai's Great Wave as a 70 × 50 cm giclée print, unframed, hung 25 cm above a 140 cm sideboard
  • Detail at actual print size: the clawed crest of the wave, the woodblock outlines and the paper grain of the 1830s impression
Katsushika Hokusai – Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave), 1830–33 | Giclée Print

Katsushika Hokusai – Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave), 1830–33 | Giclée Print

CHF 59.00
Size

A wave the height of a house is about to fall. Under its claw three fast boats of oarsmen bend flat to the hulls, and far away, small and calm, stands Mount Fuji. The mountain is the subject; the wave is only weather. That reversal is why the sheet has never stopped working.

Hokusai was around seventy when he made it, the first sheet of Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. The deep blue was new — Prussian blue, freshly imported and cheap enough for a commercial print run — and he used it for water, sky and outline alike. Impressions were pulled by the thousand and sold for the price of a bowl of noodles. Fewer than a hundred early ones are known today.

What this is. A giclée reproduction of the Metropolitan Museum's impression, printed with pigment inks. It is not a woodblock print and is not sold as one — a woodblock print is pulled by hand from cut cherry blocks, and the good impressions are in museums.

Scale
Original: 24.4 × 35.7 cm / 9.6 × 14.1 in — Metropolitan Museum of Art
50 × 40 cm / 19.7 × 15.7 in — Original size, 1:1
70 × 50 cm / 27.6 × 19.7 in — Enlarged, 1.7× original

At original size the sheet is exactly what a buyer in Edo held in two hands. Enlarged, the wave takes a wall and the woodgrain, the register marks and the flecks in the paper of 1830 become visible — a different picture, and a deliberate one.

The sheet is reproduced whole, including the title cartouche and Hokusai's signature. Nothing is cropped away but the museum's mount.

Provenance
Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), Under the Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki nami ura), also known as The Great Wave, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei), ca. 1830–32; woodblock print, ink and colour on paper, 24.4 × 35.7 cm.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1914, Acc. No. JP10.
Public domain. The Museum publishes its digitisation under Open Access (CC0).

The print
Giclée on 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, twelve pigment inks. White border, optical centre. The paper tone of the original is kept, not corrected. Unframed. Shipped rolled in a tube.

You may also like