The Great Wave off Kanagawa
From $289
Collection
The sea, ships and storms
From Hokusai's wave to Turner's last voyage — the sea as painters have argued with it for four hundred years.
Water is the hardest thing in painting and the reason marine pictures are still bought: it is never the same twice, and every one of these paintings is a different answer to the question of how to fix it. Aivazovsky paints water as glass you could fall through. Turner paints it as weather. Hokusai paints it as a claw.
This is a coastal-house collection, but not only. A single wave or a ship in a storm gives a landlocked room a horizon, and a horizon is what a small room usually lacks. The largest canvases we make are almost always seascapes, because the subject rewards width more than any other.
Two notes on honesty: Hokusai and Hiroshige were printmakers, not oil painters. Their compositions are widely reproduced in oil and we do it well, but the surface you receive will be oil on canvas, not a woodblock print, and the certificate says so.
How to size a painting in this collection
Horizontal, always, for the seascapes — except The Great Wave, which is closer to a square and looks wrong stretched into a letterbox. If the wall is wide and low, a panoramic crop of The Black Sea or The Fighting Temeraire works better than padding the sky.
Above a sofa, the canvas should be about two thirds of the sofa's width. Over a fireplace mantel, assume the painting will be seen from a low angle and choose a composition with its interest in the upper half — a big sky, not a big foreground.
Where to go next
Every painting in this collection is made to order and can be produced in a size that is not listed. Prices on each page are the published starting price for the smallest canvas; larger sizes step up on the same ladder, so there is no quote to wait for.
Questions
Questions about this collection
Yes — panoramic sizes are a normal request for this collection. Send the wall width and the height you can live with, and the artist will confirm the crop before painting. There is no surcharge for a non-standard proportion, only the normal price step for the area.
The original is a woodblock print from 1831. What we send is a hand-painted oil reproduction of that composition — brushwork rather than printed line. It is a different object from the original and priced as a painting, and we would rather say that plainly here than have you discover it on arrival.
Rolled in a rigid, moisture-protected tube, insured for the full value, and stretched by a local framer at the other end. A stretched canvas crossing an ocean needs a crate that costs several times the shipping and still arrives damaged more often.
Wall measured, painting chosen?
Send the wall dimensions and the piece you have in mind. We will confirm the size that keeps the composition intact and the date we can actually keep.