The archive / Ukiyo-e / The Great Wave off Kanagawa
⤢ Click to zoom
The Great Wave off Kanagawa
Katsushika Hokusai · 1760–1849
Trusted by buyers on Etsy
3 variations + a matched story print, every standard frame ratio. 300 DPI · sRGB · personal-use license.
Museum-quality giclée on Hahnemühle German Etching — heavyweight 310gsm, acid-free, velvety matte. Made to order & shipped.
Sizes in the download
Ready-to-print files at every size below — each drops straight into a standard frame at 300 DPI, nothing cropped:
Each of these also prints big-wall at 150 DPI — up to about 36″ on the short side (so the 36×24″ becomes 54×36″), for a step-back view. Or print the borderless master, the full-resolution scan, sharp to about 18×24″.
The work
The mountain is not the wave.
This is the most famous image from Hokusai's series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, which he began in 1830 at the age of 70. Despite the title's focus on the towering wave, Mount Fuji is rendered tiny, a diminutive peak in the distance beneath the crest of the giant wave.
Look closer
Those are not fishermen drifting by chance.
The three boats beneath the wave are oshiokuri-bune, fast barges used to rush live fish from the Izu and Bōsō peninsulas to market in Edo Bay. The series is also famous for its lavish use of the newly affordable imported Berlin, or Prussian, blue — a synthetic pigment known in Japan as 'Berlin indigo,' imported from Holland from 1820, whose arrival helped revolutionize Japanese landscape prints.
Why it matters
Not a painting, but a print that traveled the world.
The Great Wave is a mass-produced woodblock multiple rather than a unique painting; as of 2022, about 113 original impressions of the first edition are known to survive worldwide, the largest share — 35 — in American museums. Its reach extended into music: Claude Debussy kept a copy in his studio and had the image used on the cover of the original 1905 score of his orchestral work La Mer.
The file & the facts
- Title
- The Great Wave off Kanagawa
- Artist
- Katsushika Hokusai
- Year
- c. 1831
- Medium
- Woodblock print
- Original
- 25.7 × 37.9 cm
- Collection
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Rights
- Open access · personal use
- File
- 300 DPI · sRGB · JPEG
