Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave)

Hokusai was seventy when he began Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, and this is the print that made landscape a commercial subject. A wave rears over three boats of rowers while Fuji sits small and still in the trough behind it — the mountain is the subject of the series and here it is nearly lost.

The blue is Berlin blue, a synthetic pigment that had just become cheap enough to use across a whole edition. Signed 'Hokusai, changing to Iitsu'.