That’s The Great Wave at Kanagawa (ca. 1831-33), from the series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, by the great Japanese master of the ukiyo-e print, Katsushika Hokusai. That particular one I took from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s web site. It’s in the museum’s collection.

The Great Wave is just about as famous an image as the Mona Lisa. It is an incredible composition. Its supposed subject—Mount Fuji—stands placidly, eternally, in the background, but is captured in a split second, framed by a treacherous wave that threatens three fishing boats. The contrast between the foreground and the background could not be more stark. There’s no mystery about why this print has become an icon; it’s a masterpiece.

Unlike the Mona Lisa, though, it is a print. There’s not just one of it. But how many are there? Is it still a big deal to have one of them? That depends which one you have. And Seattle Art Museum has just this winter received a promised gift of a Great Wave from local collectors Mary and Allan Kollar.

I called SAM Asian art curator Yukiko Shirahara to ask her about the SAM Great Wave.

“Many people have this question,” she said. “Ukiyo-e print is public art of the time. They’d print 200 at a time, and we don’t know how many times the 200 were printed. Once they’d make a woodblock, they’d use it until it was worn out.”

That means that many, many museums around the world have Great Waves. They vary in quality so much that Japanese museums entirely devoted to ukiyo-e prints base exhibitions around demonstrating the differences between the early and the late. Early prints have clear, unbroken lines, and sensitive, bright colors, Shirahara says, before the woodblock was too worn down.

Determining which is which is an art, not a science, and Shirahara says she still needs to “check many points.” But she says she believes the one coming into SAM’s collection is early (like, she says, the Met’s), from when Hokusai was still alive and overseeing the prints.

“In the Kollar’s collection, those are earlier, which means the print reflect’s the artist’s intention more clearly,” she said. “Ukiyo-e is teamwork. Hokusai never cut the wood. He make the drawing and designate the color.”

With this gift, Shirahara says, SAM will have all three of Hokusai’s most beloved prints of Mount Fuji, The Great Wave, Thunderstorm Under the Summit, and the one known as Red Fuji. Here are the other two:

See the rest of Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views here.