# Hokusai and the Great Wave IELTS Academic Reading - 13 questions - 20 minutes - Sentence completion, True / False / Not Given Source: Written by Testmigo. ## The passage You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on the passage below. Few pictures are recognised as widely as a print of a huge wave curling over three narrow boats, with a snow-capped mountain small in the distance. Its Japanese title means 'Under the Wave off Kanagawa', but around the world it is simply called the Great Wave. The print was designed by Katsushika Hokusai and first published in 1831, when he was already in his seventies. In its own day, however, it was an everyday product: anyone in Edo, the city now called Tokyo, could buy a copy for little more than the price of a double helping of noodles. Hokusai was born in 1760 in Katsushika, a district on the eastern side of Edo, and he later took the name of this area as part of his own. He started painting at around the age of six. At fourteen he became apprentice to a woodcarver, and at eighteen he joined the studio of Katsukawa Shunshō, an artist famous for his portraits of kabuki actors. Hokusai changed his professional name to mark new stages in his career, using more than thirty names in all. One of them, Gakyō Rōjin, means 'old man mad about art', and it suited him: he kept working until shortly before his death in 1849. The Great Wave belongs to a series called Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, which the Edo publisher Nishimuraya Yohachi, of the Eijudo firm, advertised at the New Year of 1831. Each design shows Japan's most sacred mountain from a different place or in different weather. In the Great Wave, the mountain sits low in the hollow of the wave, and the foam seems almost to fall like snow onto its peak. According to the British Museum, this was the first ukiyo-e series made up entirely of landscapes. The designs sold so well that ten more were added, although the series kept its original title. Hokusai did not produce the print on his own. Woodblock printing in his time was divided among specialists. The artist drew the design; a carver cut it into blocks of cherry wood; a printer brushed colour onto the blocks and pressed paper onto them by hand; and the publisher paid for the work and sold the finished prints. Although Hokusai designed the Great Wave, its blocks were made in the workshop of a master carver hired by the publisher. The main outlines came from a single block called the keyblock, while each colour needed a block of its own. None of the carvers or printers signed their work, so Hokusai is the only person involved whose name we know. The series also owed its success to a new colour. Earlier Japanese printmakers had used blues taken from plants, such as indigo and dayflower, which were less vivid and faded fairly quickly. Prussian blue, by contrast, did not fade. First made by a paint maker in Berlin early in the eighteenth century, it is regarded as the first modern synthetic pigment. By the late 1820s it was reaching Japan in large quantities, imported through China and the Netherlands. Scientists at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York have analysed the Great Wave and found that the printers did not simply replace the old blue with the new pigment. Instead, they mixed Prussian blue with indigo for the bold outlines, and in places printed one colour over the other, darkening the blue without dulling it. Nobody knows exactly how many copies were made, because no records of the numbers printed have survived. A popular design was simply reprinted for as long as customers kept buying it, and experts believe the Great Wave blocks were used until they were worn out, perhaps after about 8,000 impressions. The wear left clues. As the keyblock wore down, lines vanished from later copies, and in the latest printings some colour blocks had been replaced with new, less accurate ones. Most of these copies are thought to have disappeared. Prints were cheap, so owners rarely took care of them, and many were destroyed in the earthquakes and fires that often struck Japanese cities. When Capucine Korenberg, a scientist at the British Museum, searched museum collections, auction records and even social media, she found photographs of 111 original prints. The British Museum itself holds three of them. For most of the Edo period, Japan's trade with the West was tightly restricted, but after foreign trade reopened in 1858, Japanese prints began to appear in shops in Paris and London. The resulting fashion became known as Japonisme. The British Museum notes that French collectors and artists were celebrating the Great Wave from the late 1870s. In 1888 Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, agreeing that the waves were like claws that had caught the boat. In 1905 the first edition of Claude Debussy's orchestral work La Mer appeared with part of the Great Wave on its cover. More recently, the image was chosen for the back of the Japanese 1,000-yen note issued in July 2024. ## Questions ### Questions 1-5: Sentence completion Complete the sentences below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. 1. Before joining Shunshō's studio, Hokusai trained under a _____. 2. Mount Fuji is shown near the bottom of the picture, framed by the _____ of the wave. 3. The carver cut Hokusai's design into blocks made from _____ wood. 4. The main outlines of the picture were printed from a block known as the _____. 5. For the bold outlines, the printers combined Prussian blue with _____. ### Questions 6-13: True / False / Not Given Do the following statements agree with the information given in the passage? Choose TRUE if the statement agrees with the information, FALSE if the statement contradicts the information, or NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this. 6. In Hokusai's time, the Great Wave was too expensive for most people in Edo. 7. Hokusai learned to paint from his father. 8. The series was so successful that additional designs were produced. 9. Hokusai carved the blocks for the Great Wave himself. 10. Prussian blue keeps its colour better than the blues that Japanese printmakers used before it. 11. Surviving records show how many copies of the Great Wave were printed. 12. The British Museum owns more original Great Wave prints than any other museum. 13. Van Gogh shared the view that the waves in the print looked like claws. [Practice online with a timer and instant marking](https://testmigo.com/ielts/reading/hokusai-and-the-great-wave) - [Answers and explanations](https://testmigo.com/ielts/reading/hokusai-and-the-great-wave/answers)