Katsushika Hokusai

Katsushika Hokusai was a painter and printmaker of Edo, today's Tokyo, who worked for some seventy years and used at least thirty different names along the way, more than any other major Japanese artist. He helped turn the woodblock print from pictures of actors and courtesans into landscapes, plants and animals, and his work later fed the craze for Japanese art that shaped Van Gogh and Monet.

He made The Great Wave around 1831, when he was about seventy, for a series called Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji: the mountain sits small in the distance while the sea rears up over three boats. Because a print fades in light, the Metropolitan Museum in New York shows its impression only for part of the year in the Japanese galleries, so check that it is on view before you make the trip for it.