The Great Wave in Cream & Gold

About this work

The towering wave rises with its claw-like foam, while Mount Fuji sits small in the distance and a red sun hangs in the sky. The colours are Prussian blue and raised gold leaf on warm cream, light and clear like a woodblock print. Where a dark version would feel like night, this one feels like open daylight.

Hokusai's Great Wave off Kanagawa, from his series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, dates from around 1831. The composition is famous for its play of scale: a huge wave in the foreground and the sacred mountain tiny behind it, caught inside the curve of the water. Hokusai used Prussian blue, a pigment that had reached Japan only a few years earlier, and the print helped make that colour part of the look of Japanese woodblocks. This version keeps the classic composition in light woodblock colours with gold. It is a reimagining in gold, not a copy.

It is the cream companion to the dark The Golden Wave. Hang it in a living room, a study or a bathroom, on white, pale blue or warm stone walls, with light wood or rattan nearby. In the Fuji in Gold set it joins The Golden Red Fuji and Moonlit Fuji, in indigo, vermilion and gold. The file prints sharply to roughly 75 cm on the long edge at 300 dpi.