Our image is taken from the “The Great Wave”, a Japanese wood block print by Hokusai (1760-1849) from a series of work entitled, Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji. Hokusai Katsushika was a prolific artist and sensational character influenced by Dutch and French pastoral landscape painters. Hokusai discovered copies of European etchings on wrapping papers used to smuggle goods into Japan during the Shogun period, a time when western cultural influences were forbidden. A man of incredible energy, he produced over 30,000 works of art, the most accomplished series in his seventies and eighties, moved 93 times in his life and changed his artistic name more than 30 times. He is best known for being the first to bring the human story into Japanese art.
