Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake
People hurry across a bridge in a sudden downpour. Van Gogh copied the picture in oils in 1887.
The rain is just thin black lines – yet we feel it.
Utagawa Hiroshige made Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake in 1857. The picture belongs to the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, on which he worked during his last years. He died in 1858, before the series was quite finished. Hiroshige was one of the most successful landscape artists in woodblock printing and was known for his earlier series on the Tōkaidō road between Edo and Kyoto. The series was published by Uoya Eikichi and comprises just over a hundred prints, arranged by season. The rain picture is among the summer prints.
The picture shows the Shin-Ōhashi bridge over the Sumida River in Edo, present-day Tokyo. A group of people hurry across the bridge in a sudden downpour. Some hold umbrellas, others wear straw capes or hold something over their heads. A raft glides along the river, and on the far bank a dark shoreline with trees can be glimpsed through the rain.
The composition is bold. The bridge runs diagonally through the picture and cuts across it. We see it from above, as if we were hovering overhead. The sky is dark at the top, and the rain falls in thin, straight lines across the whole picture. The format is vertical, which was unusual for landscapes and a novelty in the series.
The picture is a colour woodblock print made with several blocks, one for each colour. The rain is cut as fine lines on a block of its own. The sky has a dark gradation, bokashi, in which the colour gradually thins out. This demands skill from the printer, who applies the colour unevenly to the block. The blues and the grey rain create a cool, damp atmosphere.
Hiroshige captures an everyday situation, something everyone in Edo would recognise. It is not a solemn view but a moment of life in the city. The people are small and look harried, and the rain makes the scene almost comic. Many of the pictures in the series show Edo in different seasons and weathers.
Vincent van Gogh copied the picture in oils in 1887. He had collected Japanese woodblock prints in Paris and was deeply interested in them. He painted the picture in stronger colours and added a border of Japanese characters copied from other prints. His copy is in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake is one of the best-known examples of the influence of Japanese woodblock prints on European art. Impressions are held by several museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Brooklyn Museum. The picture is also an example of how art can make something fleeting, such as rain, visible.