A color woodblock print designed by Katsushika Hokusai around 1831, the most famous sheet in his series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. A great clawed breaker of blue and white rears over three slender fishing boats while, far off and tiny, Mount Fuji sits serene. Cheap popular art in its day, printed in many impressions and colored with the then-new imported pigment Prussian blue, it later poured into Europe after Japan reopened and helped ignite Japonisme. It has since traveled further than perhaps any picture ever made, becoming a global icon reproduced on everything from gallery walls to the Japanese banknote.
A great wave rears over the sea, its crest breaking into claws of foam above three slender boats whose crews crouch low. Far off, small and calm between the wave's talons and the sky, sits the snow-capped cone of Mount Fuji, dwarfed by the water yet enduring. A Japanese printmaker named Hokusai designed this image around 1831, one cheap sheet in a series on the sacred mountain, sold on the streets of Edo for the price of a bowl of noodles. It has since traveled further than perhaps any picture ever made. It hangs in museums around the world and rides on a Japanese banknote. It is so widely known that people mistake the common phone emoji for it, though that little wave is not officially Hokusai's at all.