The Wave, the Morning After
From the Whatifs Catalogue, the encyclopedia of paintings that never were. Lot of the day on Oct 7.
Created with AI, after Katsushika Hokusai, public domain.
The Wave, the Morning After is an imagined painting attributed, within the Whatifs fiction, to Katsushika Hokusai (c. 1832). It belongs to the Whatifs series of works the great masters never painted.
History and rediscovery
Scholars long suspected Hokusai had cut a sequel to his Great Wave: a letter from his publisher mentions "the sea in the morning, when it apologises". In 2024 a single impression turned up pasted to the back of a folding screen sold from a house in Nagano. Same Mount Fuji, same Prussian blue, but a glassy sea where the three boats row home with full nets. Sold for $19 million in 2025, a record for a print.
Sale
Within the fiction, the painting sold for $19,000,000 (2025). Tap the board above to replay the imagined bidding. The auction pictured below never took place.
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See also
- Las Meninas, Seen from the Mirror, Diego Velázquez
- The Hunters in August, Pieter Bruegel the Elder
- The One Who Heard, Edvard Munch
Notes
- Image generated with AI from a prompt written by Whatifs. No real painting, signature or auction house is reproduced.
- Story written for Whatifs. Any resemblance to real discoveries is coincidental.
