Japanese Woodblock Print, originally published 1814, this is a reprint made from recarved woodblocks

SIZE IN INCHES: 11.5 X 8.7 inches

COMMENTS: Perhaps the most well-known shunga print in Japanese woodblock history, Octopus and Awabi Diver better known as The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, is taken from the third volume of Kinoe no Komatsu the most famous work in the corpus of erotic prints by Katsushika Hokusai , and depicts a woman abandoned in the ecstasy of an embrace with a pair of octopuses. This composition, which the scholar Francesco Morena defines, with an extremely effective synthesis, "engaging and shocking", caused in the Western world a considerable stir when it reached Europe in the 19th century.

In 1896 Edmond de Goncourt described it as "a frightful image". In 1889, instead, Joris-Karl Huysmans wrote: The most beautiful Japanese print I know is terrifying [...]. The almost superhuman expression of anguish and pain which convulses the long Pierrot-like figure, with her aquiline nose, and the hysterical joy simultaneously conveyed by her forehead and her eyes closed as though in death, are admirable (cf. Francesco Morena, Hokusai, 2007 Giunti Editore, pp. 57-58).

Fine, no flaws