My name is Capucine Korenberg and I'm a scientist at the British Museum. I was trying to figure out
the chronology of The Great Wave. There's not just one impression of The Great Wave as many
people think. There were originally thousands of them. Nobody really knows how many there were
but we know it was a very successful print. At the time Japanese prints were very cheap and
you could buy them for the same amount of money you would buy a double helping of soba noodles,
so anybody who wanted their own print of The Great Wave could buy one. Experts think that
at least 8,000 prints of the great wave were pulled from the wood blocks and sold
and possibly prints were made until the woodblocks just started to
be so worn out that they couldn't be used anymore. And prints are not numbered or dated.
So, if you want to know if a print comes from an early edition or from a late edition, you have
to look into detail at them. I spent about 50 hours just looking at Hokusai's Great Wave.
This is about the same amount of time you would spend brushing your teeth
over two years. So, next time you brush your teeth just think of me looking at The Great Wave.
I'm surrounded with printouts from The Great Wave and one real Great Wave from our
collection. The British Museum is actually lucky enough to have three prints of The Great Wave.
I've decided to show you this one because it shows the most signs of woodblock wear.
So it's not the most pristine one because we've got one that
shows very little sign of woodblock wear, but here you can see what I’m talking about.
Most woodblocks have not survived from the Edo period. They were made from mountain cherry tree
and they were just reused, so once there was nobody interested in buying a print they would just
recycle the wood, so scrape all the design away and carve a new design. So, this is a modern woodblock
that shows how the keyblock, the original keyblock would have looked like. You see all the ridges
here they will be the details that will print out the outlines on the print so you can imagine the
the amount of time it takes to carve something like this. How an impression would be made, it
would be by applying ink on the woodblock using a little bit of nori which is rice paste,
then the paper would be applied on top of the woodblock and pressure would be applied using what's
called a baren which is a paddle made of bamboo twist and lacquer paper. You would do that with one
woodblock and then you would go to the next so it was a step-by-step process. Typically you have
the keyblock which was used to print the outline. This is just the lines, the cartouche here
and the signature, and then you had other colour woodblocks to print the blocks of colour.
On this one for instance a block was used to print the dark grey here. One was used for
all the light blue area there. One for the medium blue and so on. For each print you had one set
of woodblocks and they would be used until customers didn't want to buy any or until
the woodblock would start to deteriorate so much that they couldn’t be used anymore.
So, why a scientist of the British Museum is telling you about art history. Well, I started
working on The Great Wave when I was asked to look at its lightfastness in view of the late
Hokusai exhibition at the British Museum. I fell in love so much with this print that I wanted
to try to find everything I could about it, so I started working on it in my spare time.
Then the curator invited me to join their team working on the Hokusai prints,
and in particular on The Great Wave. I wanted to learn how this print was made and I started to
look on YouTube. I stumbled across a woodblock printer based in Tokyo, Dave Bull, who tried to
recreate his own Great Wave and what he said about The Great Wave that we had in our museum
and about The Great Waves in the Metropolitan was just fascinating to me. He said he could see small
differences between the strokes making him unsure if they'd been printed using exactly the same set
of woodblocks. I was really intrigued. I checked Dave Bull's credentials. We exchanged some emails.
I also took my courage in both hands and I sent an email to our curator. I just wrote to him and said
“I'm not sure. I'm not an expert in woodblock prints at all but I’ve met someone online who
is an expert and he's making this this claim that the three Great Waves we have in our collection
may have been printed using three different sets of woodblocks. What do you think about it?"
And he replied to me: “Capucine, this is not an email to send to a curator on a Friday evening”.
Tim told me that I almost gave him a heart attack.
But then he watched the video and he said, okay this sounds interesting. We're looking
at differences between different impressions. We're following up on the work that
Roger Keyes has done. He was a great friend of the museum and he spent almost 30 years of his life
looking at single sheet prints of Hokusai and trying to establish the sequence of them. But he
also invited other scholars to look at his results because he said you know no one's perfect. People
make mistakes I’m sure I’ve made mistakes, and I really would like people to look at my work.
And Tim asked me: “Since you're so interested on The Great Wave, can you look
at The Great Wave specifically and try to see if the sequence of states that Roger Keyes
established is right or if there are maybe mistakes”. And so this is what I did.
So, imagine the impression of The Great Wave as Hokusai intended. All the lines are crisp.
You've got no gaps in the lines. The ink is where it should be.
And we happen to be very lucky to have bought one around 2007, possibly first edition print of The
Great Wave. It's got very fine details. The signature, the borders of the cartouche,
of the title cartouche are very crisp and fine. The summit of Mount Fuji is also very precise. It
just looks perfect. All the blocks are well aligned. Because when woodblocks start to age they start
to become distorted so you've got misalignment. The prints - some colours that are covering areas
where they should not cover - but in the first edition you see none of this. It looks perfect.
The first thing I did was try to locate all the surviving impressions of The Great Wave, and that
was a bit of a treasure hunt. Roger had managed to locate about 50 of them, but he didn't do any
research after 2007, and he didn't have access to high resolution photographs. He sometimes had to
to rely on very small black and white polaroids. It was not an easy task. When I looked at Roger's
notes, he identified 21 states of woodblock wear. There are some things that didn't really
make sense. For instance, he identified in state 5 and 6 the two breaks in the cartouche, so
if you looked at the keyblock at that time, if you were there at the time this
this impression was pulled from the woodblock, you would have seen gaps in the cartouche.
But suddenly, in much later states of woodblock wear these gaps in the cartouche disappear.
So suddenly, you've got these straight lines in the cartouche, so it doesn't make sense. What I think
happened is how the printer applied the ink on the keyblock, or how much pressure he applied
with the baron on the paper, and so it's not the same amount of ink transferred
from the woodblock to the paper. So, this state five and six that Roger identified
I don't think they're proper states of woodblock wear, but differences in the printing process.
This could be due to the speed at which people had to print. There are historical
records that show that people could print three thousand keyblock impressions in
a day, so that's quite a lot of work, you have to go quite fast to do this amount of printing.
I was really lucky to have the three impressions of The Great Wave come in to
my lab, and I can tell you that the night before they were due to come to the lab I had my knees
shaking. I was just worried I would damage them in a way.
I've looked at it under high magnification. I've looked at the fibres. And when you look at the
paper oh my god it is so fibrous. We looked at the colorants that were used on the prints
and what we did was also, it's called multispectral imaging. This is when you
expose the print to different lights, so to visible light but also ultraviolet light and infrared
light which are invisible to the naked eye, and then you look whether the colorant on the print
absorbs or reflects this light and it gives you clues as to the identity of the colorant.
On this print, which I was not expecting, if you look at the sky you see that you can’t see the clouds.
But when we illuminated it with ultraviolet light, suddenly the clouds were visible.
We can infer from that that there used to be clouds on the print but the colorant
has faded. Why has it faded? Well, it could have faded possibly in the Japanese homes in the
19th century, but also we have photographs of people in Europe of collectors such as
Claude Monet the artist, or Claude Debussy the music composer who have their Japanese prints prominently
displayed on the wall by windows. People didn't know at the time that colorants were fugitive, but
by using scientific methods we can see if they've been applied on the print or not.
The easiest way to spot an early edition of The Great Wave is to look at the borders of
the cartouche. If there are no breaks then it is a first edition one most likely. Unless it's been
retouched and then you'll probably need me to know if it's an early one or a late one. This
is a rather late print. This is from the Chiossone museum in Genova in Italy. They were very nice and
sent me a high resolution picture of their Great Wave, and it's a late one because we can see
breaks into cartouche, break in the wave line, and what's really interesting is the boat.
You've got some yellow of the boats here and if you compare to an early one - compared to this one
- in this one you've got all the boats have some yellow. They all have some yellow and this one,
this boat, has no yellow. Also, this area here has been left out, it should have been printed in
yellow. It's not been. There's no yellow. So, at some point a new block was made for the yellow
areas. The colour woodblocks were made, actually, in a less durable wood. So, sometimes they had to
be replaced, but why was it replaced by such a poor version? Why didn't they bother making
a yellow area for this one? This has never been published about so I was quite happy
to have found that. Still, later on this block was changed in a very late version.
This one, which is the latest edition of The Great Wave that I've come across.
Again, this was not written about. Suddenly, instead of having only this area of the boat
printed in yellow and another part printed in grey, a new woodblock has been made to replace
the grey and the yellow and now it's printed in pink. I mean, this is a very strange
colour scheme. I had never seen a Great Wave like this before I embarked on this work, but people
apparently still liking this design because it was sold and it's survived until now.
It's not only the yellow woodblock that was re-carved. It's the light blue one. This is
easy to spot once you know what you're looking at. The light blue woodblock
at some point got lost or they decided it was too damaged to be used and they recut it.
Or someone recut it. Again, I don't know why but the shape of this new woodblock
was completely different from the original one and nobody understands why this is the case.
Why didn't they try to make something quite faithful to the original design?
We have a theory. The publisher of the 36 views of Mount Fuji,
Nishimura, had a very high reputation regarding the quality of the print so it doesn't really
make sense that you would ask someone to quickly make new blocks like for the light blue and the
yellow one. Blocks that didn't really follow the design accurately, especially the yellow one where
you've got one boat that's not printed at all in yellow. There are some letters from Nishimura who
reports that he was having some financial difficulties. Is it possible that he sold this
these blocks and maybe one got lost in transport? Or
it was so damaged that somebody decided to to re-carve one and maybe someone else,
a different publisher, was responsible for the late editions of The Great Wave? We don't know and
until we find any historical records about this we can't know more about it.
What does all this new information tell us now? Well, after revisiting Roger Keyes' research
I came to the conclusion that there are not 21 states of woodblock wear but just eight.
With this information now if you take a print of The Great Wave you can sequence it
very logically, very accurately. You can know if it's an early print or a late print. All this means
that we're more certain than ever that the three impressions of The Great Wave that we have in our
collection at the British Museum were made from the same keyblock, the keyblocks that was carved
using Hokusai’s drawings. This also means that Tim Clark has had much nicer Friday evenings. This
is an area in the museum where we've done very - I mean us scientists - we've done very little research
on Japanese prints so that was just a door opening. So no, for me it was just all very exciting stuff
that nobody had done in depth before. I'm never bored of looking at the Wave. I love the design.
I love how Hokusai has represented the sea. I love the fact that - you know - us as Europeans we
see it one way, but Japanese people who are used to to read from right to left, they see it completely
differently. And it does look a bit different. It does look a bit more threatening and dangerous.
What's next now? What I'm really interested in is to try to find out what
the print looked like when it was pristine, when it had not been faded at all by light.
All the scientific analysis we do on objects, they have to be non-destructive so
we can't come with a pair of scissors and cut a little edge and analyse. We have to be quite
resourceful. So what we think we're allowed to do is to take just a fibre. We want to
identify a colorant just by analysing a tiny tiny quantity of it. This is micro destructive, so it's
a very small element, a very small amount of material and it could tell us a lot about it.