The archive / Ukiyo-e / The Great Wave off Kanagawa
The Great Wave off Kanagawa
Katsushika Hokusai · 1760–1849
3 variations + a matched story print, every standard frame ratio. sRGB · up to 300 DPI · personal-use license.
Print it your way — at home, a local shop, or a gallery print delivered to your door. See the printing guide →
Sizes in the download
Print-ready files at every standard frame ratio below — the full image, nothing cropped:
The print is crisp at 300 DPI up to about 18×24″, and stays sharp at 150 DPI from across the room, out to about A0.
[ Will it fit your frame? ]
The work
The mountain is not the wave.
The wave fills the frame, its claw of foam curling overhead. Look past it, low and small between the troughs, and there sits Mount Fuji, a quiet peak in the distance despite the title that names it. This is the best-known image from Hokusai's series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, begun in 1830, when he was 70.
Look closer
Those are not fishermen drifting by chance.
The three slim boats riding under the crest are oshiokuri-bune, fast barges built to rush live fish from the Izu and Boso peninsulas to market in Edo Bay. The blue doing all the work is Berlin, or Prussian, blue, a new synthetic pigment imported from Holland from 1820 and known in Japan as Berlin indigo. Cheap, vivid, suddenly everywhere. It helped remake the Japanese landscape print.
Why it matters
Not a painting, but a print that travelled the world.
There is no single original. The Great Wave is a woodblock multiple, printed many times over: as of 2022, roughly 113 first-edition impressions are known to survive, 35 of them in American museums. The blocks were re-carved and reprinted for decades, and the file offered here is a faithful later impression, not one of those rare first prints. Claude Debussy kept a copy in his studio and put it on the 1905 cover of La Mer.
The file & the facts
- Title
- The Great Wave off Kanagawa
- Artist
- Katsushika Hokusai
- Year
- c. 1831
- Medium
- Woodblock print
- Original
- 25.4 × 37.6 cm
- Collection
- Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
- Rights
- Public-domain print · Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division — LCCN 2008661021 (no known restrictions, courtesy)
- File
- sRGB · JPEG · 150–300 DPI
