> Because Japanese text is read from right to left, the earliest viewers of The Great Wave would have likely read the print that way too, first encountering the boaters and then meeting the great claw of water about to swallow them. So instead of riding along with the gargantuan wave as you might in a left-to-right reading, they would face right into the massive wall of ocean.
I feel really dumb, but I have never even noticed the boats. In the reversed I see them very clearly, but in the original the wave is completely dominating the view (now I see the boats of course, but my focus is completely on the wave by default).
Worth noting the color of the boats varies from white to yellow to dark brown in the various prints, so sometimes they appear far more obviously than others.
This happened to me too! I'm not sure if it's the left-to-right thing though, that sounds a bit unlikely to me. Specifically that it's tied to the language we use. (For the record I probably default to reading left-to-right, though I also read and write in Hebrew which is RTL.)
Historical Japanese text, written vertically, is read top to bottom and right to left (like in those prints). On the other hand, more modern text (including what’s more common now) is read left to right when written horizontally. There are some more variations on directionality.
Nevertheless, the picture does look and convey a different impression when flipped.
> Baseline font metrics will never deliver great CJK typography because there are too many limitations.
>
> This is why InDesign J implements virtual body metrics based on Adobe proprietary table information for true high-end Japanese layout. There is no virtual body standard digital font metric standard so everybody implements the missing stuff on the fly and everybody does it different. Unfortunately the irony of it all is that Adobe played a huge role in how these limitations played out in the evolution of digital fonts, desktop publishing (DTP) and the situation we have today.
I have a Kobo reader which supports both ePub 2 and ePub 3, and IIRC you need ePub 3 in order to get proper RTL/top-to-bottom text and Japanese typesetting, as well as proper comics support (if you buy an ePub 3 manga, it'll properly flip the page turn direction and the progress bar; a CBZ or other format won't). But most other readers I run into don't understand ePub 3 properly.
I'm probably lower-intermediate at Japanese, so take this with a grain of salt.
I find that reading vertical text feels better, even though I first learned to read horizontal text. I don't know if this is all in my mind, or it really does have some appeal to it, though.
Ah, yeah, my main motivation is reading light novels, and I've actually read a few really easy ones. I've also read manga, but it's hard to find any that I like that are also at my level.
I'm not sure how I'd feel if the vast majority of my usage had been horizontal instead.
I own a bunch of novels in Japanese, and every single one is vertically-written. Same with all the comic books I own. I think maybe a couple children's manga I had years ago were horizontally-written, but we're talking something I haven't laid eyes on in decades, so I might be mis-remembering.
If you want to try a horizontal text layout novel for some reason, "私小説―from left to right" is one. It's a deliberate choice because it's a semi autobiographical novel about the author's life as a bilingual Japanese and English speaker growing up in the US. The text is peppered with English words and fragments of dialogue to try to convey some of the bilingual experience.
If it's not done a lot on the web, I blame CSS. With horizontal text you scroll the page from top to bottom, with vertical text from right to left. Most HTML/CSS seems to be optimized for the former. E.g. vertical percentage margins don't work like horizontal ones, and CSS3 columns have similar issues.
It’s rare in modern times, but sometimes you may encounter a sign board written horizontally right-to-left, as in this sign above the front entrance to the Nippon Budōkan:
That sign in particular says "Martial Arts Hall" ("budokan" / 武道館) from right to left.
Imagine an alternate universe where English could also be read left-to-right or right-to-left. If you were to see a sign saying "Hall Arts Martial", you'd immediately know the right way to read it.
I wonder the logic and even history of why right to left came into being. Is there any benefit in choosing a directionality of one vs another.
One thing that comes to my mind- book binding is done on the left edge of the book/news paper. So if folds are created you would go read left paper first and then to the right. Now if you are parsing left to right at higher level- At lower level wouldn’t it become consistency of UX to offer left to right reading?
It’s kinda of arbitrary. For ink:graphite writing top to bottom and right to left has the advantage of not smudging for right handers. For more durable media (carving/etching/chiseling) I think it is more arbitrary.
Boustrophedon (alternating left-to-right and right-to-left) was used sometimes in ancient Greek, so that your eyes didn't have to jump to the beginning of the next line.
Even manga translated into English is right-to-left with the first page (in English) scolding you for opening the book at the back, and telling you how to follow the text.
Also fans of some manga (especially One Piece?) will talk about how the comics will make use of this sense of right to left, with subtle timing, action, or causality often being from right to left (if Star Wars was a manga, Han would shoot from the right of the frame).
The description of the Japanese woodblock printing process in https://education.asianart.org/resources/the-ukiyo-e-woodblo... says that the artist's initial drawing is pasted face down on the woodblock, which is then carved to match it. So (unless I've got myself confused) the final print will be the same way round as the artist's drawing. This also means that text in the image (like the title and the artist's signature) come out the right way round.
I’ve been seeing this print my entire life, but last year was the first time I realized that there were boats and Mount Fuji. I was always so captivated by the claws on the wave that i never looked away from them
I've always loved this piece of art, and other similar works. One of my favorite contemporary Japanese artists borrows from that tradition, and I never get a chance to plug her work so I'll link to it here. Her name is Asuka Ohsawa: https://www.asukaohsawa.com/drawings-2#/archive/
If the strong graphic lines are what appeal to you, I could also recommend Takashi Murakami. He’s somewhat polar opposite of the previous two, but I love his work as well: https://www.takaoka-art.com/collections/takashi-murakami
And finally, my favorite contemporary artist period is named James Jean, a Taiwanese artist: http://www.jamesjean.com/
One thing that strikes me about this work, and Hokusai's other very popular wood block prints, is that he was a total perfectionist.
He would get things juuuust right, with the colour and the production process, with each copy made, then score/scratch the original so further prints could not be made to a different fashion/standard.
For him to be alive and see bright and garish "Great wave" socks, jumpers, room rugs, key rings and the like would probably cause him such a great conniption he'd drop right back dead again.
But such is the life of popular art work -- it survives its creator and lives by new rules over time.
I own his version of the Great Wave print, it's fabulous. I also recommend watching the playlist on YouTube to get a better understanding of how these prints are made as the article linked does not really explain or show you anything about the print making itself.
Mandelbrot wrote about the Great Wave having fractal like properties (eg here in an interview https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/obrist10/obrist10_index.htm...) but I hadn't seen an attempt to use a fractal to draw it; good subjects for the bbcmicrobot use repetition to help fit the code in so it suggested itself.
No. Hokusai pre-dated Impressionism by a couple of decades, but his work was known in Paris and almost certainly influenced the movement. Also worth noting this particular work's influence on Impressionist music: see the cover of Debussy's La Mer.
I first encountered it in a class where we looked at the whole series. It gives this sense of Japan being very diverse of setting, but always in the shadows of Fuji.
I've not been to Japan, and not sure of the accuracy of the size of Fuji but it does make it feel like wherever you are, Fuji is there watching.
Posters who have been to Seattle on a sunny day in summer may have a point of reference.
Mount Rainier, at a bit over 14,000 feet, is just a bit taller than Mt. Fuji (a bit over 12,000), and both are similarly-shaped stratovolcanoes. Kanagawa Prefecture (the "Kanagawa" in the print's name) is part of the greater Tokyo area, so a wave "off Kanagawa" is either in Tokyo Bay or in the Pacific just outside of it. Wikipedia's analysis suggests the perspective is from southern Tokyo Bay, around 60 miles from the peak of Mount Fuji. And downtown Seattle is, as it happens, about 60 miles from the peak of Mount Rainier.
So the view of Rainier from Seattle is quite similar to the view from of Fuji in the print. The view from Tokyo proper would place Fuji slightly smaller than Rainier, since Tokyo is slightly more distant from Fuji than Seattle is from Rainier, and since Fuji is the slightly smaller of the two mountains.
True, Mount Aconcagua (~23,000 feet) is way taller, but it doesn’t feel as dramatic as Fuji or Rainier because it’s surrounded by other big peaks in the Andes. Kilimanjaro could be another one to compare since it’s tall and stands out on its own like Fuji and Rainier, but there’s something about Fuji’s perfect symmetry that really sets it apart. If you’re looking for another mountain with that kind of shape, check out Mount Mayon, it’s smaller, but the cone is almost perfect.
It is really awe inspiring to be in the presence of a great mountain like that. I was once driving up to Bend, Oregon (where I'd never been) at night with a friend and didn't notice Mt. Shasta on the horizon as we approached. At some point I looked over to my right and it was looming directly above us. It was almost scary. I had a visceral reaction to its presence. Not dissimilar to the experience of seeing the grand canyon for the first time in person.
You can see Mount Fuji from ridiculous far away. It is a real "lone mountain".
While there are higher mountains in the Swiss alps, they are in between other mountains.
I remember reading that many of the prints attributed to Hokusai are likely imitations of what was a fairly well known style at the time. Not sure how much truth there is to it? Can't find anything saying as much in a quick google.
As an aside, I have a large print of the great wave by my front door. It's such a powerful image. I was also surprised how easy it is to find quality, quite old woodblock prints in Japan at very reasonable prices (tho not by masters!).
Just in case people aren't aware the article is to promote that the Art Institute of Chicago have one of their three prints of The Great Wave on view for the first time in 5 years. (I suspect they'll rotate through all 3 prints over the next few months to minimise how much each one is in light).
- "Japanese woodblock prints are particularly affected by exposure to light that can fade their colors and damage the paper they’re printed on. “It’s always a balancing act between wanting to show works like The Great Wave so that our visitors have a chance to experience them and preserving these works for the future,” Katz says. “We work closely with our conservators to set the parameters for the display of works on paper.”"
Imagine if there were quantum-mechanical minds that were able to appreciate quantum-mechanical art, but, the very act of contemplating, comprehending the art irreversibly degraded it. What a beautifully sad thought! A stark finiteness, like NFT's for conscious experiences.
Dyes are destroyed by the very light that illuminates them to visibility. Observation is destructive.
they can be, especially textile dyes, but in this case i think it's more the paper and binders that are damaged. prussian blue is quite light-stable despite containing iron ions, and there are plenty of black and white pigments that are light-stable over even geological time
I’d imagine somewhere there’s an engineer-artist putting such a print in a brightly lit locked box, which is programmed not to open until the interior light has shined long enough to eradicate the image on the print. (No idea if we have circuitry and LEDs that last long enough to make such a thing feasible).
This is another great introduction to the piece that provides an economic background to the subject: https://youtu.be/hGxIS6Vj0cM. In a way it’s similar to a lot of the WPA posters in the US or socialist realist labor posters from the USSR.
Wait, what?? Am I the only one who thinks this sentence is off by an order of magnitude? I'd bet that the Great Wave is not even one of the 10 most famous. Unfortunately I have no evidence to support my statement...
One thing that I fully internalised only recently - despite learning Asian languages for literally decades. The things western people take for granted as ubiquitous in our culture are often unknown to Asian cultures.
As an example recently talking to a Japanese friend who is the same age as me we realised she had seen less than 10% of the movies that "everyone born in the early 80's has seen". She didn't know who OJ Simpson was, nor is she familiar with Henry VIII and his 6 wives. She knew the Backstreet Boys & One Direction, but not Take That nor East 17.
Traveling in China a few years ago I was surprised to see many Hokusai images used on clothing and shop decorations.
The Mona Lisa might be the western world's most famous artwork, but you rarely see it on a T-shirt unless you're meeting a tourist near the Louvre. I suspect that if both were in still trademarked that Hokusai would be making orders of magnitude more on royalties than Da Vinci...
> She knew the Backstreet Boys & One Direction, but not Take That nor East 17
Not even Americans are likely to know who Take That and East 17 are. I'm a middle-aged American, university educated, have even lived abroad, and most in my circle of equally educated and well-traveled friends would consider particularly hip to cultural trends of the late 20th century.
I've literally never even heard of East 17, and I am vaguely aware of Take That being a band, but if you hadn't included them in the same sentence as BSB and 1D (whose members I cannot name except for Zane and Harry, plus there's an Irish guy??), I wouldn't have even clocked "oh yeah, that's a band I've heard mentioned a couple times in my life"
> She didn't know who OJ Simpson was, nor is she familiar with Henry VIII and his 6 wives. She knew the Backstreet Boys & One Direction, but not Take That nor East 17.
Well, I'm French and it's the same for me. I think what Americans (and the British? I know Henry VIII is a king if England, even if I have no idea how many wives he could have had) greatly overestimate how shared their culture is in the western world.
Though living in Belgium I've noticed the Flemish are much more aware of such American things than we are, so maybe it's just the French who aren't well integrated into the "global western" culture.
Well, both the Met and the Art Institute of Chicago disagree with you on that. One thing that'll throw you off, mentioned in the article: the Wave isn't a painting, and if you look for artwork rankings (it's the Internet, of course these exist) they tend to rank paintings.
The Waves at the Art Institute aren't their most iconic, popular pieces; that honor probably goes to Seurat's Sunday Afternoon.
I should get back over there soon. It's been forever.
> The Waves at the Art Institute aren't their most iconic, popular pieces; that honor probably goes to Seurat's Sunday Afternoon.
Well, there's only one Sunday Afternoon, but if you have a few thousand dollars, you, too, can own an original Waves, since there's no such thing as "the" original when you're talking about collecting prints.
Much like there isn't a "one" Warhol soup can painting. These artists' works were infinitely replicable even in their own day. That's why in the Japanese art world, prints produced in the artist's lifetime are all considered original because they would've all been made by the same hand, or an assistant's.
EDIT: After googling, it appears that it's estimated 8,000 copies of the Great Wave were made by Hokusai, but that few of them still exist. That's surprising to me, honestly. One recently sold for $2.7 million, apparently, and I couldn't believe that search result. My mistake!
EDIT 2: That being said, the British Museum alone owns three original Great Wave copies.
Right, the question here is whether the Wave itself is among the world's most famous works of art; the answer seems pretty clearly to be "yes". I threw the Seurat thing in as sort of a preemptive rebuttal to the idea that the Art Institute would hype up the Waves just because it has them. :)
There's a large number of bootleg Hokusai ripoffs - back in the early 1800s there were woodblock shops turning out near-exact copies, and some museums have discovered their prints are knockoffs.
Wow! Never thought about it like this before:
> Because Japanese text is read from right to left, the earliest viewers of The Great Wave would have likely read the print that way too, first encountering the boaters and then meeting the great claw of water about to swallow them. So instead of riding along with the gargantuan wave as you might in a left-to-right reading, they would face right into the massive wall of ocean.
Reversed image from the article to demonstrate: https://artic-web.imgix.net/5c05c38c-1c80-446f-a3db-4b95b42e...
I feel really dumb, but I have never even noticed the boats. In the reversed I see them very clearly, but in the original the wave is completely dominating the view (now I see the boats of course, but my focus is completely on the wave by default).
I am in the same ..err ...boat.
I am now convinced there is a strong element of left-to-right versus right-to-left in the way we process images.
Fascinating!
Me too! I'd only ever noticed the waves
Worth noting the color of the boats varies from white to yellow to dark brown in the various prints, so sometimes they appear far more obviously than others.
This happened to me too! I'm not sure if it's the left-to-right thing though, that sounds a bit unlikely to me. Specifically that it's tied to the language we use. (For the record I probably default to reading left-to-right, though I also read and write in Hebrew which is RTL.)
Even dumber, I never noticed Mt. Fuji was in the pic, focus was truly on the wave.
In some prints Fuji is coloured to look like a small wave (my personal preference) but in later prints is coloured differently to stand out.
Historical Japanese text, written vertically, is read top to bottom and right to left (like in those prints). On the other hand, more modern text (including what’s more common now) is read left to right when written horizontally. There are some more variations on directionality.
Nevertheless, the picture does look and convey a different impression when flipped.
This is true of documents, text messages, social media etc., but most books, magazines and other printed matter are still done vertically and R-L.
Wow, I didn't know that! I thought vertical text was a thing of the past. Interesting.
Only because Western-centric systems don't handle non-LTR text properly.
https://atadistance.net/2019/10/20/japanese-text-layout-for-...
> Baseline font metrics will never deliver great CJK typography because there are too many limitations. > > This is why InDesign J implements virtual body metrics based on Adobe proprietary table information for true high-end Japanese layout. There is no virtual body standard digital font metric standard so everybody implements the missing stuff on the fly and everybody does it different. Unfortunately the irony of it all is that Adobe played a huge role in how these limitations played out in the evolution of digital fonts, desktop publishing (DTP) and the situation we have today.
I have a Kobo reader which supports both ePub 2 and ePub 3, and IIRC you need ePub 3 in order to get proper RTL/top-to-bottom text and Japanese typesetting, as well as proper comics support (if you buy an ePub 3 manga, it'll properly flip the page turn direction and the progress bar; a CBZ or other format won't). But most other readers I run into don't understand ePub 3 properly.
I'm probably lower-intermediate at Japanese, so take this with a grain of salt.
I find that reading vertical text feels better, even though I first learned to read horizontal text. I don't know if this is all in my mind, or it really does have some appeal to it, though.
I’m not native, but have read and spoken Japanese fluently for almost twenty years. I still can’t get used to and hate vertical text.
Maybe it’s because 99% of my Japanese context is business-related or on devices (computer, phone) and I don’t read novels, manga, etc.
Ah, yeah, my main motivation is reading light novels, and I've actually read a few really easy ones. I've also read manga, but it's hard to find any that I like that are also at my level.
I'm not sure how I'd feel if the vast majority of my usage had been horizontal instead.
A typical eye is stronger at up-down motion and weaker at left-right motion. That comes up sometimes when adding rules (guidelines) to tables.
I own a bunch of novels in Japanese, and every single one is vertically-written. Same with all the comic books I own. I think maybe a couple children's manga I had years ago were horizontally-written, but we're talking something I haven't laid eyes on in decades, so I might be mis-remembering.
If you want to try a horizontal text layout novel for some reason, "私小説―from left to right" is one. It's a deliberate choice because it's a semi autobiographical novel about the author's life as a bilingual Japanese and English speaker growing up in the US. The text is peppered with English words and fragments of dialogue to try to convey some of the bilingual experience.
That is the only one I've encountered though.
Mangas often mix and match, depenfong on what best fits the image.
If it's not done a lot on the web, I blame CSS. With horizontal text you scroll the page from top to bottom, with vertical text from right to left. Most HTML/CSS seems to be optimized for the former. E.g. vertical percentage margins don't work like horizontal ones, and CSS3 columns have similar issues.
Definitely
Novels are often written vertically as well, so it's fairly common still.
It’s rare in modern times, but sometimes you may encounter a sign board written horizontally right-to-left, as in this sign above the front entrance to the Nippon Budōkan:
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nippon_Budokan_-_2...
How does one know whether to read left to right or right to left? Or is it clear from the text?
It's usually clear from context.
That sign in particular says "Martial Arts Hall" ("budokan" / 武道館) from right to left.
Imagine an alternate universe where English could also be read left-to-right or right-to-left. If you were to see a sign saying "Hall Arts Martial", you'd immediately know the right way to read it.
Cheap Trick was live at a martial arts hall?
txetnoC
I wonder the logic and even history of why right to left came into being. Is there any benefit in choosing a directionality of one vs another.
One thing that comes to my mind- book binding is done on the left edge of the book/news paper. So if folds are created you would go read left paper first and then to the right. Now if you are parsing left to right at higher level- At lower level wouldn’t it become consistency of UX to offer left to right reading?
It’s kinda of arbitrary. For ink:graphite writing top to bottom and right to left has the advantage of not smudging for right handers. For more durable media (carving/etching/chiseling) I think it is more arbitrary.
Boustrophedon (alternating left-to-right and right-to-left) was used sometimes in ancient Greek, so that your eyes didn't have to jump to the beginning of the next line.
Even manga translated into English is right-to-left with the first page (in English) scolding you for opening the book at the back, and telling you how to follow the text.
Also fans of some manga (especially One Piece?) will talk about how the comics will make use of this sense of right to left, with subtle timing, action, or causality often being from right to left (if Star Wars was a manga, Han would shoot from the right of the frame).
Horizontal right-to-left was common historically
I think that's just the natural direction to draw a wave as a right handed person.
Interesting. It's a woodblock print, so I think it would have been created backwards from the final product?
The description of the Japanese woodblock printing process in https://education.asianart.org/resources/the-ukiyo-e-woodblo... says that the artist's initial drawing is pasted face down on the woodblock, which is then carved to match it. So (unless I've got myself confused) the final print will be the same way round as the artist's drawing. This also means that text in the image (like the title and the artist's signature) come out the right way round.
Oh nice. Thanks!
I don't feel any difference in both the images.
My eyes first see the large wave in both photos.
I’ve been seeing this print my entire life, but last year was the first time I realized that there were boats and Mount Fuji. I was always so captivated by the claws on the wave that i never looked away from them
And here I am never even noticing the claws.
Another thing to know is that the prints aren’t all the same: https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/great-wave-spot-differenc...
Also, here’s a nice Lego version: https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2020/12/jumpei-mitsui-great-w...
This is mentioned in the article. Art Institute of Chicago have 3 prints and show them next to each other so we can see the differences.
I've always loved this piece of art, and other similar works. One of my favorite contemporary Japanese artists borrows from that tradition, and I never get a chance to plug her work so I'll link to it here. Her name is Asuka Ohsawa: https://www.asukaohsawa.com/drawings-2#/archive/
My first association is Jed Henry's fun postmodern take
https://www.outregallery.com/collections/jed-henry
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/i4ny20/jed_henrys_a...
I love this style. You say "one of my favourite", can you recommend more artists in that genre?
Her exact style is fairly unique, which is why I’m such a fan. But another great example is Hisashi Tenmyouya:
http://tenmyouya.com
If the strong graphic lines are what appeal to you, I could also recommend Takashi Murakami. He’s somewhat polar opposite of the previous two, but I love his work as well: https://www.takaoka-art.com/collections/takashi-murakami
And finally, my favorite contemporary artist period is named James Jean, a Taiwanese artist: http://www.jamesjean.com/
"All I have done before the age of 70 is not worth bothering with" - Katsushika Hokusai
(He began the series when he was 70 years old)
This quote and fact alone gave me hope. Hope I can remember it when the time comes.
One thing that strikes me about this work, and Hokusai's other very popular wood block prints, is that he was a total perfectionist.
He would get things juuuust right, with the colour and the production process, with each copy made, then score/scratch the original so further prints could not be made to a different fashion/standard.
For him to be alive and see bright and garish "Great wave" socks, jumpers, room rugs, key rings and the like would probably cause him such a great conniption he'd drop right back dead again.
But such is the life of popular art work -- it survives its creator and lives by new rules over time.
Hokusai only drew the original sketch as a watercolour. A team of other people did the carving, colouring, printing all overseen by the publisher.
There is a very good multi part video about creating a facsimile of the print on YouTube https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jAhiMCSvtCc
I own his version of the Great Wave print, it's fabulous. I also recommend watching the playlist on YouTube to get a better understanding of how these prints are made as the article linked does not really explain or show you anything about the print making itself.
My own toots-worth of code version for the bbcmicrobot https://mastodon.me.uk/@bbcmicrobot/111846600975531195
Mandelbrot wrote about the Great Wave having fractal like properties (eg here in an interview https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/obrist10/obrist10_index.htm...) but I hadn't seen an attempt to use a fractal to draw it; good subjects for the bbcmicrobot use repetition to help fit the code in so it suggested itself.
My claim to fame in life is having hauled a highland bagpipe up Mt. Fuji and blown "Amazing Grace" at the summit.
Which is a terrible idea. The air pressure at that altitude does not support driving four reeds, especially through a splitting headache.
Well done, though!
I have several versions of this, I just enjoy looking at them. I have a desk mat, Lego set, and my favourite:
https://shop.kozyndan.com/products/uprisings-poster
Would the original be considered impressionist?
No. Hokusai pre-dated Impressionism by a couple of decades, but his work was known in Paris and almost certainly influenced the movement. Also worth noting this particular work's influence on Impressionist music: see the cover of Debussy's La Mer.
Thank you for a great answer :)
The Lego set is gorgeous. I was impressed that the finished design has built-in hardware in case you want to hang it on a wall!
I first encountered it in a class where we looked at the whole series. It gives this sense of Japan being very diverse of setting, but always in the shadows of Fuji.
I've not been to Japan, and not sure of the accuracy of the size of Fuji but it does make it feel like wherever you are, Fuji is there watching.
Posters who have been to Seattle on a sunny day in summer may have a point of reference.
Mount Rainier, at a bit over 14,000 feet, is just a bit taller than Mt. Fuji (a bit over 12,000), and both are similarly-shaped stratovolcanoes. Kanagawa Prefecture (the "Kanagawa" in the print's name) is part of the greater Tokyo area, so a wave "off Kanagawa" is either in Tokyo Bay or in the Pacific just outside of it. Wikipedia's analysis suggests the perspective is from southern Tokyo Bay, around 60 miles from the peak of Mount Fuji. And downtown Seattle is, as it happens, about 60 miles from the peak of Mount Rainier.
So the view of Rainier from Seattle is quite similar to the view from of Fuji in the print. The view from Tokyo proper would place Fuji slightly smaller than Rainier, since Tokyo is slightly more distant from Fuji than Seattle is from Rainier, and since Fuji is the slightly smaller of the two mountains.
True, Mount Aconcagua (~23,000 feet) is way taller, but it doesn’t feel as dramatic as Fuji or Rainier because it’s surrounded by other big peaks in the Andes. Kilimanjaro could be another one to compare since it’s tall and stands out on its own like Fuji and Rainier, but there’s something about Fuji’s perfect symmetry that really sets it apart. If you’re looking for another mountain with that kind of shape, check out Mount Mayon, it’s smaller, but the cone is almost perfect.
It is really awe inspiring to be in the presence of a great mountain like that. I was once driving up to Bend, Oregon (where I'd never been) at night with a friend and didn't notice Mt. Shasta on the horizon as we approached. At some point I looked over to my right and it was looming directly above us. It was almost scary. I had a visceral reaction to its presence. Not dissimilar to the experience of seeing the grand canyon for the first time in person.
You can see Mount Fuji from ridiculous far away. It is a real "lone mountain". While there are higher mountains in the Swiss alps, they are in between other mountains.
Map from where Fuji can be seen (Japanese) https://info.jmc.or.jp/fujisankoko/
The site Great Wave Today maintains a list of where it is on display: https://greatwavetoday.com
I love the Great Wave and have spent a lot of time trying to get my laser engraver to make a good image of it. The entire series is excellent.
If you enjoy his work, I highly recommend checking out some of this others, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dream_of_the_Fisherman%27s...
I remember reading that many of the prints attributed to Hokusai are likely imitations of what was a fairly well known style at the time. Not sure how much truth there is to it? Can't find anything saying as much in a quick google.
As an aside, I have a large print of the great wave by my front door. It's such a powerful image. I was also surprised how easy it is to find quality, quite old woodblock prints in Japan at very reasonable prices (tho not by masters!).
Just in case people aren't aware the article is to promote that the Art Institute of Chicago have one of their three prints of The Great Wave on view for the first time in 5 years. (I suspect they'll rotate through all 3 prints over the next few months to minimise how much each one is in light).
- "Japanese woodblock prints are particularly affected by exposure to light that can fade their colors and damage the paper they’re printed on. “It’s always a balancing act between wanting to show works like The Great Wave so that our visitors have a chance to experience them and preserving these works for the future,” Katz says. “We work closely with our conservators to set the parameters for the display of works on paper.”"
Imagine if there were quantum-mechanical minds that were able to appreciate quantum-mechanical art, but, the very act of contemplating, comprehending the art irreversibly degraded it. What a beautifully sad thought! A stark finiteness, like NFT's for conscious experiences.
Dyes are destroyed by the very light that illuminates them to visibility. Observation is destructive.
they can be, especially textile dyes, but in this case i think it's more the paper and binders that are damaged. prussian blue is quite light-stable despite containing iron ions, and there are plenty of black and white pigments that are light-stable over even geological time
I’d imagine somewhere there’s an engineer-artist putting such a print in a brightly lit locked box, which is programmed not to open until the interior light has shined long enough to eradicate the image on the print. (No idea if we have circuitry and LEDs that last long enough to make such a thing feasible).
Use thermopaper. Problem solved
That’s how food works.
This is another great introduction to the piece that provides an economic background to the subject: https://youtu.be/hGxIS6Vj0cM. In a way it’s similar to a lot of the WPA posters in the US or socialist realist labor posters from the USSR.
> If not the most famous artwork in the world
Wait, what?? Am I the only one who thinks this sentence is off by an order of magnitude? I'd bet that the Great Wave is not even one of the 10 most famous. Unfortunately I have no evidence to support my statement...
One thing that I fully internalised only recently - despite learning Asian languages for literally decades. The things western people take for granted as ubiquitous in our culture are often unknown to Asian cultures.
As an example recently talking to a Japanese friend who is the same age as me we realised she had seen less than 10% of the movies that "everyone born in the early 80's has seen". She didn't know who OJ Simpson was, nor is she familiar with Henry VIII and his 6 wives. She knew the Backstreet Boys & One Direction, but not Take That nor East 17.
Traveling in China a few years ago I was surprised to see many Hokusai images used on clothing and shop decorations.
The Mona Lisa might be the western world's most famous artwork, but you rarely see it on a T-shirt unless you're meeting a tourist near the Louvre. I suspect that if both were in still trademarked that Hokusai would be making orders of magnitude more on royalties than Da Vinci...
> She knew the Backstreet Boys & One Direction, but not Take That nor East 17
Not even Americans are likely to know who Take That and East 17 are. I'm a middle-aged American, university educated, have even lived abroad, and most in my circle of equally educated and well-traveled friends would consider particularly hip to cultural trends of the late 20th century.
I've literally never even heard of East 17, and I am vaguely aware of Take That being a band, but if you hadn't included them in the same sentence as BSB and 1D (whose members I cannot name except for Zane and Harry, plus there's an Irish guy??), I wouldn't have even clocked "oh yeah, that's a band I've heard mentioned a couple times in my life"
> She didn't know who OJ Simpson was, nor is she familiar with Henry VIII and his 6 wives. She knew the Backstreet Boys & One Direction, but not Take That nor East 17.
Well, I'm French and it's the same for me. I think what Americans (and the British? I know Henry VIII is a king if England, even if I have no idea how many wives he could have had) greatly overestimate how shared their culture is in the western world.
Though living in Belgium I've noticed the Flemish are much more aware of such American things than we are, so maybe it's just the French who aren't well integrated into the "global western" culture.
Well, both the Met and the Art Institute of Chicago disagree with you on that. One thing that'll throw you off, mentioned in the article: the Wave isn't a painting, and if you look for artwork rankings (it's the Internet, of course these exist) they tend to rank paintings.
The Waves at the Art Institute aren't their most iconic, popular pieces; that honor probably goes to Seurat's Sunday Afternoon.
I should get back over there soon. It's been forever.
> The Waves at the Art Institute aren't their most iconic, popular pieces; that honor probably goes to Seurat's Sunday Afternoon.
Well, there's only one Sunday Afternoon, but if you have a few thousand dollars, you, too, can own an original Waves, since there's no such thing as "the" original when you're talking about collecting prints.
Much like there isn't a "one" Warhol soup can painting. These artists' works were infinitely replicable even in their own day. That's why in the Japanese art world, prints produced in the artist's lifetime are all considered original because they would've all been made by the same hand, or an assistant's.
EDIT: After googling, it appears that it's estimated 8,000 copies of the Great Wave were made by Hokusai, but that few of them still exist. That's surprising to me, honestly. One recently sold for $2.7 million, apparently, and I couldn't believe that search result. My mistake!
EDIT 2: That being said, the British Museum alone owns three original Great Wave copies.
Right, the question here is whether the Wave itself is among the world's most famous works of art; the answer seems pretty clearly to be "yes". I threw the Seurat thing in as sort of a preemptive rebuttal to the idea that the Art Institute would hype up the Waves just because it has them. :)
There's a large number of bootleg Hokusai ripoffs - back in the early 1800s there were woodblock shops turning out near-exact copies, and some museums have discovered their prints are knockoffs.
According to the article:
> The Art Institute is fortunate to have three prints of The Great Wave, all original editions.
In https://www.google.com/search?q=famous+artwork I got it at the 26th position.
The search gives a few lists, but all of them feel western-biased.
The results are almost all ranking paintings, and the Great Wave is not a painting.
The parent post didn't say it's not present. In fact it's at the 26th place. So the ranking does not exclude non-paintings.
Exactly this.
Its certainly one of the most influential. The style still echoes in modern anime Japanese animation.
I think the Great Wave would be high on the most recognisable chart.
Not that a single data point is particularly useful, but I'd never come across it before reading the article.
I agree, reading the subject article is the first time I've ever seen it that I can remember.
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