The Japanese woodblock artist who made what may be the most recognizable image in the history of Japanese art, the towering clawed breaker known as The Great Wave off Kanagawa, part of his series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. Astonishingly prolific across a long life, restless enough to change his name dozens of times, he worked in ukiyo-e, the popular print art of Tokugawa Japan, and insisted into his late eighties that he was only beginning to learn. When his prints reached Europe after Japan reopened, they helped ignite Japonisme and reshaped Western painting.
A giant wave rears over the sea off the coast near Edo, its crest breaking into claws of foam, while in the trough below three slender boats and their crews crouch beneath it. Far away, small and calm between the wave's curl and the sky, sits the snow-capped cone of Mount Fuji. A Japanese printmaker named Hokusai designed this image around 1831, one sheet in a series on the sacred mountain, and it became something he could never have planned: one of the most reproduced and recognized pictures on earth. It hangs in museums around the world. It rides on a Japanese banknote and lives on phone screens as wallpapers, icons, and memes. Hokusai made it past the age of seventy, and he still complained he had not yet learned to draw.