Katsushika Hokusai: The Great Wave off Kanagawa (Under the Wave off Kanagawa)

The Great Wave off Kanagawa Created around 1832, this iconic woodblock print stands as the most celebrated image from Hokusai's series "Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji," despite depicting the mountain as a tiny peak dwarfed by a dramatic foreground. The composition revolutionized landscape art by inverting traditional perspectives, placing an enormous wave with claw-like foam in the foreground while wealthy Mount Fuji recedes mysteriously in the distance. Hokusai's masterful use of Prussian blue—a newly available pigment in Japan at the time—and his innovative technique of combining multiple woodblocks created a work that bridged Japanese ukiyo-e tradition with Western artistic influences, influencing generations of artists from the Impressionists onward.