A huge wave curls over three fishing boats, its foam breaking into claws, and far behind it Mount Fuji sits small and still. It is a woodblock print, not a painting, made in the early 1830s as part of a series of Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.

Thousands of copies were printed and sold cheaply. Hokusai was over seventy. Look for the deep Prussian blue: an imported European pigment that was new in Japan and made the series a hit.