Clementoni - Hokusai: The Great Wave (Museum) 1000 Piece Jigsaw Puzzle

Hokusai's Great Wave off Kanagawa, printed around 1831, and probably the most reproduced image ever made in Japan. From Clementoni's Museum Collection, and it is a far more interesting build than a decorative print.

What you are looking at

The wave rises from the left and breaks across the top of the picture, its crest splitting into dozens of clawed fingers of foam. Under it, three long open boats with crews of rowers crouched flat along the hulls, driving through the trough. A second wave rears in the foreground.

And in the middle distance, small and snow-capped and easy to miss, Mount Fuji. The print is from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, so the mountain is the actual subject and the wave is the framing. The signature and series title sit in a cartouche in the top left. The whole thing is done in Prussian blue, a pigment newly available to Japanese printmakers at the time, with a cream and apricot sky behind.

What it is like to build

A woodblock print behaves completely differently from a painting. There is no tonal modelling anywhere. Every colour is a flat area with a hard black outline, so almost every piece carries a usable boundary.

Build the wave crest first. The clawed foam fingers are the most distinctive shapes in the picture and there is nothing else like them. Then the boats, the only warm brown. Then Fuji, which is the only white triangle. The two large flat areas are the difficulty: the apricot sky and the deep blue troughs, both with very little internal detail. Both go in near the end, and the sky is helped by the fine printed grain in the original block.

Why Clementoni

Italian, Museum Collection, made in Italy. Flat blocks of a single ink are exactly where print quality is visible: if the Prussian blue shifts across the sheet, the largest region of the puzzle becomes unsortable. Poster included.

Specifications

A little context

Fine art is one of the pillars we go deep on rather than treat as a sideline, and a woodblock print is one of the most rewarding things in it: flat colour and hard line make it satisfying to build, and the finished piece genuinely earns a frame. Worth knowing that this is one of a set of thirty-six, and that the mountain is the point. Derived from multiple public data sources across retail, search and community platforms, refreshed 31 August 2026.

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