note that Japanese read pictures from right to left, while Western readers read left to right. Westerners view the last image as an awesome wave and usually miss the boats, while Japanese viewers relate to the boats first and then feel how doomed they are.
Well now I'm just confused about how I am supposed to read the image. Like... It's numbered 1 2 3 4. Is that top left to bottom right? Which one is the "last" one? Which one is the "first" one?
Hey, I'm going to leave this up since it's aroused interest, but for future reference, HistoryPorn is for photographs. HistoryDrawings or HistoryArtifacts would be more appropriate for this kind of content.
HistoryArtifacts for porn etched on some artistic physical medium, HistoryDrawings for reconstructions of pornographic historical scenes, HistoryPorn for photographic porn?
Top left is going to be first, bottom right is last. Since bottom left is pretty close in structure to bottom right, I'm going with top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right.
That fits the reading pattern of western cultures.
I think that's the intended way too, but it's not exactly a given as other languages have different reading patterns. Japan, for instance, reads right to left, and others read vertically.
Very interesting, I have never seen the earlier versions before. I wonder why I can't find a Fuji in two of those, because The Great Wave is part of a "Views of Mt. Fuji" series.
Lol, that would be such a troll move in a series of Fuji paintings. As far as I known Hokusai painted mainly two things, landscapes including Mt. Fuji and explicit porn scenes. He was a trained Mt. Fuji Painter, which is a respected craft with a specialized apprenticeship in Japan btw.
The Japanese artist Hokusai and his art. The last painting is quite famous but most of us haven't seen the pieces that helped him develop his style along the way.
These are actually woodblock prints, not paintings. But yes Hokusai was one of the great masters of the technique. The art style here from the Edo period is called Ukiyo-e, or "floating world" / "transient world".