The Woodblock Prints That Pulled Van Gogh and Monet Toward Japan

Updated October 15, 2026 | By Tokyo Paul

In 1831 or thereabouts, a man in his early seventies in Edo (now Tokyo) finished a design of a wave that curls like a claw over three small boats, with Mount Fuji sitting small and calm in the distance. His name was Katsushika Hokusai, and the print became The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Roughly a thousand copies were printed in the first run, and about eight thousand are thought to have been made in total. They sold as affordable souvenirs, not as grand art, yet today the image is among the most reproduced in the world.

That unlikely journey, from cheap Edo print to global icon, is the story of ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world). The term describes woodblock prints and paintings of the Edo period (1603 to 1868) that showed actors, courtesans, travelers and landscapes. When Japan opened to the West, these sheets crossed the sea and reshaped how European artists thought about line, color and composition. Here is how they were made, why they mattered, and where you can see them in Tokyo.

A Print Was a Team Effort

Ukiyo-e is often described as the work of a single famous name, but a print was made by four people. The artist designed the image. The carver cut the woodblocks, the printer inked and pressed them onto handmade paper, and the publisher paid for the project, promoted it and handled distribution. The publisher decided what would sell, which is why so many prints follow the fashions of the day, from kabuki stars to the latest travel craze. Prints were made to be cheap and plentiful, often said to cost about as much as a bowl of noodles, which explains why ordinary townspeople in Edo could afford to collect them.

The first ukiyo-e prints are credited to Hishikawa Moronobu, who began signing his work around 1672. For decades the prints were limited to black ink, sometimes hand-colored. Then in 1765 Suzuki Harunobu popularized nishiki-e (brocade pictures), full-color prints that soon became the standard. Color transformed the market, and printmaking studios in Edo began producing sheets with a range of color and detail that astonished later collectors.

Cherry Wood, Paper and a Baren

The process began with a drawing on thin paper, which was pasted face down onto a block of cherry wood. The carver then cut away everything except the lines, leaving them standing in relief. From that key block, copies were pulled and used to carve a separate block for each color, so a complex print could need a dozen or more blocks. Small registration notches ensured that every color landed in exactly the right place.

The printer brushed pigment onto a block, laid a damp sheet of handmade paper over it, and rubbed the back with a baren, a disc-shaped hand pad. The pressure and moisture pushed color into the fibers, which is why good prints have a soft, matte glow. Printers could blend color on the block itself to create gradations, such as a morning sky fading from pink to blue. Each impression was done by hand, so no two copies are perfectly alike.

Hokusai and the Great Wave

Hokusai was born in 1760 and worked until his death in 1849, producing an astonishing amount of art across seven decades. The Great Wave belongs to his series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, and it is celebrated for its drama and its dark, saturated blue. That color was Prussian blue, a synthetic pigment imported from Europe, which began arriving in Japan in large quantities around 1829. Hokusai was among the first to make bold use of it.

Look closely at the composition and you will see the trick. The wave dominates the picture, the boats are tiny, and Fuji is a small triangle whose shape echoes the foam of a wave crest. The eye jumps between the two. Western artists later admired this fearless sense of scale, in which a humble subject shares the stage with the monumental. The print survives in museums in New York, London, Boston, Chicago, Amsterdam and Tokyo, among others, although only a limited number of first-edition impressions remain.

Hiroshige and the Road Through Japan

Where Hokusai was dramatic, Utagawa Hiroshige was lyrical. His series The Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido, from 1833 and 1834, followed the road between Edo and Kyoto and made him famous. Armchair travelers of the time could take the road in print form, station by station, with rain, snow, ferries and travelers in each scene. In his last years he produced One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, issued between 1856 and 1858, with bridges, markets and blossoms as the settings. Hiroshige died in 1858, and the series stands as a farewell portrait of his city.

His prints are quiet, with flat areas of color, crisp horizons and unexpected viewpoints, such as a branch, a carp streamer or a bridge pillar cutting across the foreground and framing the scene beyond it. The artists who copied him admired exactly these features. Vincent van Gogh made copies of Hiroshige prints, among them a painting based on The Blooming Plum Tree, and he included Japanese prints in the background of his portrait of Pere Tanguy.

How Japonisme Changed Western Art

After Japan reopened to foreign trade in 1858, art and objects from Japan flowed into Europe. A display at the 1867 Paris Exposition raised interest, and in 1872 the critic Philippe Burty coined the word japonisme for the fashion. Ukiyo-e declined in Japan after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, and many prints were exported to the West, which later led some Japanese critics to complain that dealers were draining the country of its art.

Western artists absorbed what they saw. Claude Monet owned a large collection of Japanese prints and shaped parts of his garden at Giverny with Japanese ideas, including the arched bridge over the lily pond. Van Gogh organized an exhibition of Japanese prints in Paris in 1887. James McNeill Whistler drew from Japanese ideas of composition, and Mary Cassatt made prints with a clearly Japanese influence. Cropped views, flat color and bold outlines all owe a debt to Edo printmakers.

Plan Your Visit

In Tokyo, the Sumida Hokusai Museum opened in November 2016 in the ward where the artist was born. It was designed by Kazuyo Sejima of SANAA, and it holds more than 1,800 Hokusai-related items. Opening hours are listed as 9:30 to 17:30 with last admission at 17:00, but check the official site for closing days, admission fees and current exhibitions before you go. The building has a faceted, mirror-like exterior, and it sits a short walk from Ryogoku, the sumo district, so the two make an easy pairing in one day.

The Ota Memorial Museum of Art in Harajuku opened in 1980 and draws on a collection of more than 12,000 pieces. Because prints are sensitive to light, it presents rotating exhibitions, so what you see depends on the month. The Tokyo National Museum also shows ukiyo-e in rotation. Always check the current exhibition list online first, since the specific prints on view change often, and the one you want may be in storage.