The Great Wave off Kanagawa, printed around 1831, was not Hokusai's first big wave. For more than thirty years before it, Katsushika Hokusai kept returning to the same idea: a towering sea, small boats and a distant shore. Three earlier pictures, from 1797, 1803 and 1805, show the motif slowly taking the shape the world now recognises. Placed side by side, as a Twitter user named tkasasagi did in 2018, they make a fascinating study in how an artist refines a single image across a lifetime.
Four waves at a glance
- 1797: Spring at Enoshima (Enoshima shunbō), an illustration from the poetry book Yanagi no ito. Hokusai was in his late thirties.
- 1803: View of Honmoku off Kanagawa (Kanagawa-oki Honmoku no zu).
- 1805: Fast Cargo Boat Battling the Waves (Oshiokuri hato tsūsen no zu).
- Around 1831: Under the Wave off Kanagawa, better known as The Great Wave, the first print in the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.
Some online posts give the first picture as 1792 and Hokusai's age as 33. The British Museum, which holds an impression, dates Spring at Enoshima to 1797. Ages quoted for Hokusai can also look one or two years "too high" because Japan then counted a newborn as one year old and added a year at each New Year.
1797: a wave beside the travellers
Spring at Enoshima, 1797. Image: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
In the earliest picture, the sea is only part of the story. A group of travellers stands on the shore in the foreground, with the island of Enoshima and a small Mount Fuji beyond. Yet the breaking wave on the left is already drawn with care, its curling lines far more active than the calm figures beside it.
British Museum curators point out that this wave is more dynamic than in the painting Hokusai was working from, and they see it as an early sign of the wave imagery that peaks with The Great Wave. The lines are fine and the detail is delicate, typical of his style at that time.
1803 and 1805: the wave takes over
View of Honmoku off Kanagawa, 1803. Image: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
Six years later the people are gone and the water is the subject. In View of Honmoku off Kanagawa, a huge wave rises on the right while a sailing ship cuts across the middle. The colours are soft and the crest is reduced to simple bands of line, with little decoration. The horizontal title lettering and framed border are often read as a nod to the European prints then reaching Japan through Dutch traders.
Fast Cargo Boat Battling the Waves, 1805. Image: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
By 1805 the composition is close to the final version. A long boat crowded with rowers dips into the trough, and a dark wall of water curls over it from the left. Compared with 1803, Hokusai has swapped the wave's side and made the boat a main actor. A low shoreline sits far behind. What is still missing is the sense of the wave as something alive, with claws of foam reaching down.
Around 1831: The Great Wave
The Great Wave off Kanagawa, about 1831. Image: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
In the finished print, three fast boats called oshiokuri-bune, used to rush live fish to market in Edo, are caught between two waves. The huge crest towers over them, its foam breaking into finger-like tips. Far behind, Mount Fuji looks small enough to be another wave, a visual rhyme that ties the print to the series it opened.
Several things changed from 1805:
- Viewpoint: we look from low in the water, so the wave looms over us as well as the boats.
- Colour: Hokusai used Prussian blue, a synthetic pigment that had become widely available in Japan around 1829. Its strong, lasting blue gave the sea a new intensity.
- Contrast: the tiny, calm mountain sits against chaos in the foreground, which makes the scene feel both still and violent.
The print is a woodblock, made for sale rather than as a one-off painting. About 1,000 impressions were made at first and perhaps 8,000 in total as the blocks wore down. As of 2022, about 113 first-edition impressions were known to survive, in collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago.
How Hokusai saw his own progress
Hokusai, born in Edo in 1760 and active until his death in 1849, worked under at least thirty different names and kept experimenting into old age. In the postscript to his book One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, begun in 1834, he looked back on his career with famous modesty. In one common translation, he says "of all I drew by my seventieth year there is nothing worth taking into account".
He went on to say that at seventy-three he had begun to understand the structure of animals, birds, insects and fish, and that he hoped to keep improving until he was over a hundred. It is a striking statement from a man who, at about seventy, had just made one of the most famous images in art history.
Read against that, the four waves are not a straight march toward a masterpiece. Each is a finished picture made for its own purpose: a book illustration, two experimental landscapes and a print series about Mount Fuji. What links them is an artist testing how a wave, a boat and a horizon can balance each other.
Why The Great Wave still matters
Japanese prints flooded into Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, and The Great Wave became one of their best-known ambassadors. Vincent van Gogh praised its drawing and wrote about its emotional force. Claude Debussy kept a copy in his studio and asked for the image on the cover of his orchestral work La Mer in 1905.
Today it appears on everything from posters to emoji. Looking at the earlier waves is a useful reminder that the image was not a single flash of genius. It grew out of decades of looking, drawing and changing his mind. If you like to compare a scene with its artwork, you may also enjoy our piece on places behind famous paintings.
Sources: British Museum: Enoshima shunbō (Spring at Enoshima), 1797; Wikipedia: The Great Wave off Kanagawa; Wikipedia: Hokusai; Open Culture, December 2018; My Modern Met. Comparison first shared by @tkasasagi on Twitter.
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