Courbet and The Great Wave

I feel like an email I received the other day from my good friend Blaine should have been written on parchment and hand delivered to me by a strapping young man on horseback. Alas, I received it via gmail but it was nonetheless eloquent and insightful, just like Blaine himself.

"I remember once we were discussing in class how the ukiyo-e prints were arriving in Europe around the time the Realist movement was turning Impressionistic. I was looking at Gustave Courbet recently, and what should I find but just those influences on a European painter from just that time period!
Astonishing. It is not simply the same subject manner, but balance, movement, economy, and even stylistic choices. I hope you enjoy, and that comparing these two paintings becomes something of an epiphany."