The Great Wave off Kanagawa
Hokusai's woodblock print of a giant breaking wave with Mt. Fuji in the distance — the most globally recognized non-Western artwork.
Origin
Katsushika Hokusai produced it around 1831 as part of his series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. It's a woodblock print, not a painting, made for mass-market consumption and printed in around 5,000 copies (a few hundred survive). The wave is enormous and curling; the three boats beneath it are tiny; Mt. Fuji in the background is smaller than the wave itself. The print arrived in Europe wrapped around Japanese export goods and helped trigger the late-19th-century Japonisme craze, influencing Monet, Degas, and Van Gogh.
Modern usage
On the emoji keyboard as 🌊 (the official Unicode design is explicitly modeled on Hokusai). Used in everything from surf-shop logos to climate-crisis posters. The image stands in for 'Japan,' 'tsunami,' 'unstoppable force,' and 'beautifully styled disaster' depending on context.
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