The Great Wave off Kanagawa collection Metropolitan Museum of Art
Prints in the world
About 1,000 copies of The Great Wave off Kanagawa were initially printed, resulting in wear in later editions of print copies. It is estimated approximately 8,000 copies were eventually printed.The first signs of wear were in the pink and yellow of the sky, which fades more in worn copies, resulting in vanishing clouds, a more uniform sky, and broken lines around the box containing the title. Some of the surviving copies have been damaged by light, as woodblock prints of the Edo period used light sensitive colourants. As of 2022, about 100 copies of The Great Wave off Kanagawa are known to survive; some of these copies are housed at Tokyo National Museum, the Japan Ukiyo-e Museum in Matsumoto, the British Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Sackler Gallery in Washington D.C., the Giverny Museum of Impressionisms in Giverny, France, the Musée Guimet and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France both in Paris, the Edoardo Chiossone Museum of Oriental Art in Genoa, the Civico Museo d'Arte Orientale in Trieste, the Museo d'arte orientale in Turin, the last three in Italy. Some private collections such as the Gale Collection also have copies of The Great Wave off Kanagawa.Nineteenth-century private collectors were frequently the source of museum collections of Japanese prints; for example, the copy in the Metropolitan Museum came from Henry Osborne Havemeyer's former collection, which his wife donated to the museum in 1929. The copy in the Bibliothèque nationale de France came from the collection of Samuel Bing in 1888, and the copy in the Musée Guimet is a bequest from Raymond Koechlin, who gave it to the museum in 1932.In 2023, one of the prints was sold for a record price, 2.8 million dollars.
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