There's a curious thing about Katsushika Hokusai's Under the Wave off Kanagawa – the renowned Japanese woodblock print that has come to be known, simply, as The Great Wave. Although the composition is dominated by a monstrous ridge of saltwater, which rises from the ocean like the Leviathan, the "star" of the picture is, in fact, the distant, snow-capped peak of Mt Fuji, visible on the horizon.
"The sea is churning up, and everything is in flux," explains Timothy Clark, the curator of Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave, an exhibition that has just opened at the British Museum. "But Mt Fuji, which is a deity in Japanese religious belief, is the solid centre – it's the fulcrum. Once you notice it, the foam coming down from the wave starts to look like snow falling on top of the mountain. The perspective is very playful."
![Hokusai's <i>The Great Wave off Kanagawa</i>.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170612172320im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/h/z/i/0/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gwe9cl.png/1495899641146.jpg)
Yet, since Hokusai's print was first issued, probably in 1831, the human drama in the foreground has compelled more attention than Mt Fuji, as three high-speed skiffs, full of skilled oarsmen competing to bring a fresh spring catch to the fish market in central Edo (as Tokyo used to be called), surge towards a freak storm wave.
Endlessly reproduced, parodied, and ripped off, The Great Wave is probably the most famous work of Japanese art. Only recently, a cartoon in The New Yorker cast President Trump as the Great Wave – with "foam" supplied by his wispy comb-over – menacing a boatload of innocent people in the foreground, and threatening the Statue of Liberty, which occupied the same spot as Mt Fuji in the original print.
![Mt Fuji is the central focus of <i>The Great Wave</i>.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170612172320im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/g/w/5/4/n/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gwe9cl.png/1495899641146.jpg)
Yet, while Hokusai's image is instantly familiar, few people realise that, when the artist created it, his life was at perhaps its lowest ebb. Born in Edo in 1760, Hokusai established himself as a prolific master of Japanese art, admired for the skill of his brushwork, his subtle understanding of the human figure, and for revitalising the tradition of ukiyo-e, or "pictures of the floating world" (i.e. images of people in the entertainment industries, including sex workers and kabuki actors).
However, towards the end of the 1820s, when he was in his late sixties, Hokusai was struck by a series of catastrophes. First, he suffered a stroke; but is said to have managed his own recovery using remedies he'd created himself. Then, in the summer of 1828, his wife died. At the same time, Hokusai was anxious about his profligate grandson, who was running up gambling debts that jeopardised the whole family.
In the New Year of 1830, the artist took stock of his desperate financial circumstances in a letter: "No money, no clothing, barely enough to eat," he wrote. "If I can't make some arrangement by the middle of next month, I won't make it through the spring."
In this context The Great Wave, which appeared soon afterwards, seems like a terrifying expression of the personal calamities that looked set to engulf him.
It was around 1830 that the publisher Nishimuraya Yohachi commissioned Hokusai to produce a new body of work. At the end of that year, an advertisement appeared, announcing an original series of prints called Thirty-Six Views of Mt Fuji, with "one view per sheet, issued in succession, printed in blue".
This was the series of landscapes to which The Great Wave belongs. It proved popular: thousands of impressions of each design were sold. Indeed, it was so popular that, eventually, 46 views were issued, although the title of the series remained the same.
Part of the appeal of the prints was their affordability: each was on sale for around the cost of a bowl of noodles. Today, a good impression of The Great Wave would set you back tens of thousands of pounds, if not more.
The National Gallery of Victoria's copy of the iconic picture was in the state's top 10 favourite art works as chosen by a poll of 8000 people in 2011.
The Great Wave did not belong to the first group of prints in Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views, which were printed exclusively in shades of blue. Rather, it came later in the series, when Hokusai was building up complexity by adding colours other than blue.
To produce the print, Hokusai collaborated closely with specialist craftsmen, who transferred his original brush-and-ink drawing onto a cherry-wood block. This established the print's outlines – though, in the process, Hokusai's original drawing was destroyed.
Today, the meaning of The Great Wave continues to be debated. It is instructive to consider Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views in the context of a religious cult, surrounding Mt Fuji, which was popular in Edo in the artist's day. This had a large membership of around 70,000 devotees, mostly artisans and merchants, organised into confraternities. Periodically, members were selected by lottery to embark on pilgrimages up the mountain.
Hokusai's publisher Nishimuraya was part of this Fuji cult. We don't know if Hokusai was, too, but Mt Fuji certainly held great personal significance for him: late in life, he incorporated a stylised Mt Fuji into his artist's seal.
In addition, some art historians point out that, of all the images in the Thirty-Six Views series, The Great Wave looks back at Mt Fuji from a vantage point farthest out into the Pacific, far from the Japanese coast. This is significant in the context of the country's changing relationship with the rest of the world during the 19th century.
"Hokusai produced The Great Wave at a time when the outside world was starting to impinge upon Japan," Clark explains. "Foreign warships were coming into Japanese coastal waters much more frequently. There was demand for Japan to reopen regular trade."
At the time, the regime, or Shogunate, remained suspicious: lords responsible for guarding Japan's coastline were encouraged to fire on foreign warships at sight. You could argue, Clark suggests, that The Great Wave reflects "a general sense of anxiety about an encroaching outer world".
It's a fascinating theory – but it only goes some way to explaining the picture's enduring, universal power. "There's no one answer to the question of why The Great Wave is so iconic," Clark counters. "Graphically, it grabs you – almost literally, with the tentacles of the wave. It has become emblematic not only of the power of the sea, but also, by extension, of the whole of nature. It's a really strong, memorable image of forces we cannot control."
Daily Telegraph