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.
