The Great Wave enters the collection of Palazzo Maffei in Verona along with other Japanese woodcuts

Entering the collection of Palazzo Maffei Casa Museo in Verona is an original 1831 woodcut of the Great Wave of Kanagawa by Katsushika Hokusai done in the ukiyo-e style. Hokusai’s Great Wave is part of the collection of color woodcuts on paper entitled The Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, published in Japan beginning in 1830 by Nishimuraya Yohachi. There are few original examples of this woodcut in the world, preserved in the most prestigious museums and major international institutions, from the Metropolitan Museum in New York to the French National Library, and in Italy there are only three other examples: one in the Museo Chiossone in Genoa and the others in the museums of Oriental Art in Trieste and Turin.

At Palazzo Maffei, Hokusai’s iconic work is accompanied by another work of his and a nucleus of five other original woodcuts by coeval artists also from the then city of Edo, Utagawa Hiroshige and Utagawa Kunisada, allowing an encounter with an artistic culture distant to us but fundamental to the history of world art, and the discovery of another aspect of Luigi Carlon’s collecting passion.

“We are excited about this new presence at the Museum,” commented collector and president of the Luigi Carlon Foundation. “A House Museum that continues to be enriched with works significant to world art and I believe exciting to visitors. There have been many and very diverse arrivals of new works in recent months, and we would like to unveil them to the public as we go along, also to show how this House Museum can be a continuous surprise and a continuous source of new beauty and knowledge.”

Image: Katsushika Hokusai, The Great Wave of Kanagawa (1831; color woodcut on paper, ukiyo-e style; Verona, Palazzo Maffei Casa Museo, Carlon Collection)

The Great Wave enters the collection of Palazzo Maffei in Verona along with other Japanese woodcuts

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