Hokusai's Great Wave off Kanagawa
The most recognisable Japanese print in the world
Around 1831 the seventy-year-old Katsushika Hokusai published the print series 'Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji'. It opened with a claw-crested wave towering over fishermen's boats, with a tiny Mount Fuji in the distance. Hokusai used a newly imported pigment, Prussian blue. The print ran to thousands of impressions and later inspired Van Gogh and Debussy.
Wikipedia (Russian) · Wikipedia (English) · 19th century
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Europe
- 1814–1815 Congress of Vienna — 17 years earlier
- 1816 Year Without a Summer — 15 years earlier
- 1833 Abolition of slavery in the British Empire — 2 years later
- 1839 Birth of photography: the daguerreotype — 8 years later
- 1845–1852 Great Famine in Ireland — 14 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1812 Napoleon's invasion of Russia — 19 years earlier
- 1853–1856 Crimean War — 22 years later
Middle East
- 1828 Treaty of Turkmenchay — 3 years earlier
- 1839 The Edict of Gülhane opens the Tanzimat — 8 years later
- 1839–1842 First Anglo-Afghan War — 8 years later
Africa
- c. 1835–1846 The Great Trek — 4 years later
- 1847 Liberia declares independence — 16 years later
Americas
- 1817 San Martín's Crossing of the Andes — 14 years earlier
- 1822 Independence of Brazil — 9 years earlier
- 1835 Darwin in the Galápagos — 4 years later
- 1838–1839 Trail of Tears — 7 years later
- 1846 First public demonstration of ether anaesthesia — 15 years later
Oceania
- 1851 The Australian gold rushes — 20 years later
Alive at the time
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (aged 82)
- Alexander Pushkin (aged 32)
- Charles Darwin (aged 22)
- Abraham Lincoln (aged 22)
- Karl Marx (aged 13)
- Queen Victoria (aged 12)
- Fyodor Dostoevsky (aged 10)
- Leo Tolstoy (aged 3)
- Katsushika Hokusai (aged 71)
- Andrew Jackson (aged 64)