Which post-impressionist painter praised The Great Wave off Kanagawa in a letter?

Vincent van Gogh praised The Great Wave off Kanagawa in a letter. His admiration reflects the powerful influence that Hokusai’s woodblock prints had on European artists in the late nineteenth century.

Van Gogh encountered Japanese ukiyo-e through prints circulating in Paris, where he lived with his brother Theo from 1886 to 1888. He collected Japanese prints and studied their bold outlines, flattened areas of color, unusual cropping, and direct treatment of nature. In a letter, he expressed enthusiasm for Hokusai and described the artist’s work with the excitement of someone discovering a new visual language.

The Great Wave was not an Impressionist painting, nor was Hokusai a European modernist. He was an Edo-period Japanese artist working in the ukiyo-e tradition. Nevertheless, his compositions helped shape Japonisme, the European fascination with Japanese art that influenced Van Gogh, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and others.

Van Gogh’s own Japonaiserie paintings and his copies after Japanese prints show how seriously he took this influence. The connection is sometimes oversimplified: Van Gogh admired Hokusai, but he did not paint The Great Wave itself.