The Great Wave owes its blue to a pigment from Berlin
Under the Wave off Kanagawa, better known as The Great Wave, shows a huge wave curling over three boats while Mount Fuji sits small in the distance. Katsushika Hokusai designed it as a colour woodblock print, published around 1831 as the first in his series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. He was about 70 when the series began.
The print is famous for its composition, but its colour was news at the time too. Much of its blue is Prussian blue, a pigment that had only recently become plentiful in Japan.
A blue from Berlin
Prussian blue was probably first made around 1706 in Berlin by a paint maker, Johann Jacob Diesbach, most likely by accident. It is considered the first modern synthetic pigment. European painters had relied on blues such as indigo and ultramarine, which was ground from lapis lazuli and very expensive. The new blue was stable and resisted fading, it soon took the place of ultramarine for many uses, and within a few years it was being sold across Europe.
Japanese painters and printmakers had no long-lasting blue of their own. The indigo they used was delicate and faded quickly. Prussian blue was imported through the Dutch from 1820 and arrived in large quantities in 1829. In Japanese it was called Berlin ai, Berlin indigo, shortened to bero ai.
Hokusai's publisher, Nishimuraya Yohachi, saw its appeal. The first ten prints of the series, The Great Wave among them, were among the first Japanese prints to use it, and in January 1831 he advertised the new blue widely. It was an immediate success, and the next ten prints in the series were printed mostly in blue. In The Great Wave, Hokusai used Prussian blue alongside the traditional indigo.
About 1,000 impressions were printed at first, and an estimated 8,000 in all, so the blocks wore down and later copies differ. The print was an immediate success in Japan and later in Europe, where Hokusai's work inspired the Impressionists. A blue invented in Berlin went east in Dutch ships, and came back to Europe in a Japanese print.
Where was Prussian blue first made?
Much of the Great Wave's blue is Prussian blue, a synthetic pigment first made in Berlin and newly plentiful in Japan when Hokusai designed the print.
