Under the Wave off Kanagawa, also known as the Great Wave, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji

In the spring of 1913 the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright was in Japan, chasing the commission for Tokyo's Imperial Hotel and buying woodblock prints on behalf of two Boston brothers, William and John Spaulding. This impression of the Great Wave was among the sheets he sold them. The publisher had printed the design in very large numbers, and this is one impression of that edition. By 1921, when the brothers gave their collection to the Museum of Fine Arts, it ran to more than 6,000 prints, and they attached one unusual condition. The prints were never to be shown in the galleries. Many of the colours in Japanese prints fade quickly in light, and the Spauldings wanted them kept as they had arrived. So this sheet has spent more than a century in storage, and most people know it from photographs. The museum owns seven impressions of the Great Wave. This one, number 21.6765, carries Hokusai's signature but no censor's seal and no publisher's mark.