“The Great Wave off Kanagawa”, one in the series of Thirty-Six Views of Mt Fuji by the ukiyo-e great Hokusai is easily one of the most widely known, most famous, examples of Japanese art for people all around the world. I find it wonderfully ironic, therefore, that it serves as such a great example of Western influence, and of a divergence from earlier ukiyo-e and earlier Japanese art in general.
What is it about the image that makes it distinctly Western? Any ideas? It doesn’t depict a Western subject – there are no Western people, fashions, or architecture here. It’s not done in oil paints, nor in the hyper-realistic style of Western oils of certain periods.
But it does use a Western pigment – Prussian Blue. One of the first synthetic pigments to be developed in the world, it resists fading far better than the vegetable-based dyes earlier Japanese printmakers used. The pigment was first introduced to Japan around 1828, making The Thirty-Six Views of Mt Fuji (1830-31) some of the earliest Japanese works to make use of it.
What else in this print shows the influence of Western art? Look at the boats, the crest of the wave, and the mountain. What can be said about their relative sizes? What effect does this create? Does the image look perfectly flat? Or do you sense a tunnelling effect, as if you are looking far/deep into the image, across the surface of the water, at Mt Fuji in the distance? This technique is Western perspective, something Japanese artists only began experimenting with in the 18th century. Prior to that, depth or distance was usually portrayed using an overlapping effect (placing one object directly over another, partially blocking the view of the second object, to show their relative positions); a roof-blown-off overhead 3/4 view; or by placing nearer objects towards the bottom of an image, and farther objects towards the top, with areas of blank negative space, representing mist or water, separating them.
Western perspective was hardly new in Hokusai’s time, as uki-e (“floating pictures”) had been being made since the 1750s or perhaps even earlier, based off of woodblock printed reproductions of Dutch images coming into Japan via Nagasaki, but it nevertheless was a foreign influence, a foreign element incorporated into Japanese art, thus blowing the lid off the misconception that works of Japanese art, least of all Hokusai’s “Great Wave”, were somehow purely Japanese, a purely exotic and foreign art historical tradition distinct from that of European art.
[…] images. While I am sure that a great many visitors are drawn in by an opportunity to see the Great Wave off Kanagawa, I hope they stay and take the time to look closely at the other images in the series, especially […]