The Great Wave Is Painted in a Color Smuggled In as Contraband

Prussian blue was invented in Berlin around 1704, in a lab accident by the chemist Johann Konrad Dippel. It was the first synthetic modern pigment: brighter than indigo, more lightfast, and after a few decades much cheaper. It set off a "blue fever" across European painting.

It reached Japan slowly. Tokugawa Japan was almost entirely closed to foreign trade; the Dutch were the one European nation allowed a foothold, on a tiny artificial island called Deshima in Nagasaki harbor. Small amounts of Prussian blue trickled through Deshima from around 1790, but the price was high enough that ukiyo-e printers, working on cheap paper for a popular market, almost never used it.

What changed was a copy. In the early 1800s an entrepreneur in Guangzhou reverse-engineered the formula and started producing the pigment in China at a fraction of the Berlin price. The Tokugawa government had banned imports of it, so the cheap Chinese version moved into Osaka and Edo as smuggled goods. Printers called it bero — a corruption of the Dutch "Berlyns blaauw."

Hokusai's publisher, Nishimuraya Yohachi, promoted the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji series in 1830 partly as a showcase for the new blue. The Great Wave off Kanagawa was among the first prints in the run. The intense, almost luminous deep blue in the wave and sky — the thing that makes the image readable from across a room — is a Berlin chemistry experiment that crossed two oceans, got pirated in China, and entered the country illegally before reaching the woodblock.