It was created 190 years ago and is still recreated everywhere.

In murals and tattoos, on stamps and clothing, in cartoons and even in emojis: 'The great wave of Kanagawa', by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, does not seem to lose her charm.

And it is that at a few two5.7 for 37.8 centimeters, Hokusai managed to capture an epic scene, an oceanic drama with a simple but tremendously powerful composition.

A scene that you have most likely seen but did you know that...

'The great wave' is actually a view of Mount Fuji, one of a series of color impressions that Hokusai designed around 1830 that, despite being 46 xylographs in total, it is called "thirty -six views of Mount Fuji".

In those days, Mount Fuji was seen as a protected deity, spectacularly visible from Edo, the modern tokyo.

It caused some fear, due to the possibility of an eruption of the volcano, but also worship, because the snow of his top was his source of water, and some thought he kept the secret of immortality.

In fact, although the whole series liked when it was launched, 'Fuji Red' was much more popular than 'the great wave' in Japan of 1800, due to spiritual reverence towards the Holy Mountain.

Over time that reverence became a cult with elements of Buddhism and Shintoism.The one who was not the favorite did not want to say that 'the great wave', with the fishing skifs that are lost in the waveFuji in the distance, will go unnoticed.

Shortly after publication, other prints began to appear in which his influence was palpable.

And, he said himself, he was still learning;Moreover, he was convinced that his best work was to come.

In moving memories he wrote at 76, he opened his heart.

"From 6 (years), I had an inclination to copy the shape of things.From 50, my images were published...", referring to ten volumes of drawings, each with 60 pages covered with images of all imaginable themes: real and imaginary figures and animals, plants, marine landscapes, dragons, poets and deities...anyway.

They were called "manga", a kind of modern manga prototype, although the meaning was slightly different at that time.

After a pause, ten more volumes of his manga were commissioned, and asked to be made with cheaper paper so that his ideas could be spread more widely.

Perhaps his previous experience producing celebrities impressions, affordable and changing with the fashion of the moment made him aware of the power to reach a wide audience.

"But until 70 years, nothing I drew was worth mentioning," he continues to say in his memoirs.

At "73 years I could unravel the growth of plants and trees, and the structure of birds, animals, insects and fish.Therefore, when he turns 80, I hope I have progressed more and more, and in the 90.

"Thus, at 110, each point and every line will be as if it were alive".

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He ends by saying: "Those who live enough, testify that these words are not false".And then sign, with his name, followed by the description "Elder, crazy for painting".That "old man, crazy about painting" was extremely fit and active.At 80 he accepted an invitation to paint waves in Obuse, two40 km north of Edo.Walked the entire distance.

But he could not fulfill his desire to continue painting until 110.He died in 1849, at age 89, without suspecting how great the fate that awaited his great wave.

'The great wave' of Hokusai only reached other people's coasts 18 years after his death, and more than 35 after he created it, as Japan was isolated for two centuries.

Since 1640, the country had largely closed to the world and only a limited interaction with China and Holland was allowed.

Although the foreigners could not enter Japan, foreign things could certainly do it, something that is clearly seen in 'the great wave'.

It is printed on traditional Japanese mulberry paper in subtle tones of yellow, gray and pink.But the color that dominates is an intense and deep blue...A blue that was not Japanese.

It is the blue of Prussia, invented half a world of distance, in Germany, 130 years before the wave of Hokusai broke.

That color shows us that Japan took from Europe what I wanted with absolute confidence.

Moreover, the series of which he was part 'The Great Wave' was promoted to the public in part on the basis of that exotic and beautiful blue, appreciated for his strangeness.

And that was not the only import that Hokusai took advantage of.

With the mathematical perspective he had learned from European engravings brought by Dutch merchants, Mount Fuji pushed at the bottom of the scene.

So 'the great wave', points in "the history of the world in 100 objects" of the BBC the historian and former director of the British Museum Neil MacGregor, is far from being essentially Japanese, as we usually think.

It is a hybrid work, a fusion of European materials and technology with Japanese sensitivity.

"It is not surprising to like it so much when arriving in Europe.It was not a complete stranger, but an exotic relative ".

In the 1850s, when the industrial revolution advanced, the great manufacturing powers aggressively sought new sources of raw materials and new markets for their products.

It seemed incomprehensible, in fact intolerable, the closed attitude of Japan.In the end, the Americans concluded that free trade would have to be imposed by force.And they succeeded.

When the borders opened, there was an avalanche of Japanese visual culture in the West, and its influence on Western arts was such that it even has a name: Japanese.

The presentation in Society -Cididental- of 'The Great Wave' occurred in the Universal Exhibition of 1867 in Paris, and its impact was revolutionary.

The contrast of simplicity with which he expressed such drama and the great European oils was abysmal.

'The Great Ola' of Hokusai was one of the Japanese works that deeply motivated the French impressionist movement, which in turn shapes the course of European modernism, the artistic and philosophical movement that would define in the early twentieth century.

Painters like James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) and Gustave Coubet (1819-1877) realized that the representation of the waves was an opportunity to free themselves from the limitations of realism.

The impressionists accepted the challenge and, towards the end of the 19th century, when the movement evolved towards post -impressionism, the iconic marine landscape of Hokusai served even more as a stylistic guide for artists such as Vincent Van Gogh.

In a letter to his 1888 brother, Van Gogh comments: "('La Gran Ola') of Hokusai makes you scream [" I didn't know that one could be so scary with blue and green "] but in his case with hislines, your drawing? You tell yourself: these waves are claws, the ship is trapped in them, you can feel it ".

There are those who point to "star night" by Van Gogh, with the blue of Prussia and the shapes of the Hokusai wave in the sky, as the most vivid sample of the footprint he left in the European modernist founders of the Japanese artist.

Several more absorbed 'the great wave' and leaked her in her creations, not only in painting.

At the end of the 19th century, the French Camille Claudel created "La Vague" (1897), a sculpture in which the ships of 'La Gran Ola' were replaced by marine nymphs.

The composer Claude Debussy, who worked with an impression of 'La Gran Ola' on the wall of his study, chose a reproduction of that Hokusai work for the cover of the first edition of the score of the orchestral piece "La Mer" publishedby a. Durand & Fils en 1905.

We know that in 184two the price of each impression of 'La Gran Ola' officially set in 16 mon, the equivalent of a double noodle ration.

It was a cheap art, but when it was printed in large quantities with exquisite technical standards, it could be very profitable: people fascinated to decorate their homes.

However, in Japan, wood engravings were not seen as art, as Christine Guth, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, BBC, so that the cultured elite and government officials did notI was pleased that those were the emblems of Japanese culture in the outside instead of other less plebsy things.

In a way, his wishes were therefore made with the wars of the twentieth century, Japanese artistic expressions lost prominence.

But, unexpectedly, in the 1960s a new generation of young artists got excited about popular culture and one of the popular sources of inspiration were the ancient Japanese xylographs, produced in large quantities, cheap and so beautifully executed with a great economy of media.

Andy Warhol, David Hockney and particularly Roy Fox Lichtenstein took ideas from artists such as Hokusai and reinterpreted their vision: 'The great wave' had a special meaning for them.

In Japan, popular art also returned through the poster very much in the spirit of Hokusai.

In 1966, for example, Tadanori Yoko, one of the most successful Japanese artists, used "the great wave" and combined it with contemporary icons such as the bullet train.

He did it again in another 1969 poster, in which the crest of the wave becomes a horse, as in the work of 1910 "horses of Neptune", by the British Walter Crane, who fascinated Japanese art, reflecting inThe poster evidence of the round trip trip of the work.

Thus, little by little, "the great wave" conquered the world again.

Ah!And what at the beginning cost the same as a double ration of noodles, today it costs many more: in March two0two1, an engraving of 'The Great Wave' made around 1831 was sold for 1.6 million dollars in auction of auction ofJapanese and Korean art by Christie's Asia in New York.

Many people assume that 'the great wave' represents a tsunami.

"We can be sure that it is not a tsunami," Chris Swan's Hydrodynamics expert, from Imperial College in London, told the BBC.

"Tsunamis are waves generated by seismic events, often in deep water.When that happens, the wave has a very long crest, which is not the case in the image ".

Product of your imagination?

Not precisely: sailors have reported such phenomena, but only until relatively little they began to believe, thanks to scientific research.

"It is an image of a giant wave, vagabunda or monster, a pyramidal wave.They are waves that are generated by the overlap: the sum of many existing waves, ridges on ridges ".

Thus, what Hokusai drew is a natural phenomenon, instilling in the image an extraordinary drama and scale, and originating one of the best representations of the power of the sea in art history.