April Fakes Day 2024: The Yoro Waterfall

Dr Capucine Korenberg, Senior scientist, Department of Scientific Research at the the British Museum.

The Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) is renowned for his iconic design of the woodblock print “The Great Wave” (Fig.1), but did you know he also crafted a stunning series of eight ukiyo-e prints titled “A Tour of the Waterfalls in Various Provinces”?

Listing image: Fig 4. “Yoro Waterfall in Mino Province” (1833). © The Trustees of the British Museum

Fig 1. “The Great Wave” (1831). © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Among them is “Yoro Waterfall in Mino Province”, which holds significance in Japanese folklore centred around filial piety. Legend has it that a man, on the brink of death, was saved by his devoted son who gathered water from the Yoro Waterfall and offered it to him. Miraculously, the father regained his health upon drinking the water.

Fig 2. “Yoro Waterfall in Mino Province” (date of production unknown). © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Take a closer look at the waterfall depicted in the print (Fig. 2). Do you notice something unusual on its right-hand side in the upper area? Some of the water, depicted in dark blue, appears to momentarily vanish and then reappear. Did Hokusai make a mistake?

Surviving letters written by Hokusai (Fig. 3) indicate that he paid meticulous attention to detail and would not hesitate to voice his dissatisfaction to publishers if he felt his high standards were not met in the printing process. It is highly unlikely that he would have overlooked such an error.

Fig 3. Extract of Hokusai’s letter to the woodblock cutter Sugita complaining about the cutting of eyes and noses in his illustrations for the book “Ehon Toshisen” (1833) and requesting that they are modified (this letter was transcribed by K. Iijima in his book “Katsushika Hokusai den” published in 1893). © The Trustees of the British Museum

In fact, this print is not an original work but a high-quality forgery created after Hokusai's death. We know this because when we analysed the dyes and pigments present on the print using Raman spectroscopy we detected ultramarine blue on the green areas, a synthetic pigment that was not available in Japan during Hokusai’s lifetime.

Many Western collectors of Japanese prints were deceived by these high-quality forgeries of the series “A Tour of the Waterfalls in Various Provinces” and they have found their way into numerous museum collections around the world, including those of the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Compare this with the original Hokusai's Yoro Waterfall print below (Fig. 4): you will notice that the water flows uninterrupted here...