Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake

In 1857 Utagawa Hiroshige made Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake for One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, the last great series of his career. People on the wooden bridge are caught in the downpour. Most of them hunch under straw hats and straw rain capes. One figure carries a small umbrella. A boatman poles across the river, and Atake sits on the far bank as a dark line of trees.

The rain is a set of carved lines

The rain is black line, cut in the wood so that what remains prints as long parallel strokes running down the sheet. They travel the same way over the sky, the river, the bridge, and the figures. That is the part of the design people remember.

Van Gogh knew the print. In Paris, in October and November 1887, he painted Bridge in the Rain (after Hiroshige), now in the Van Gogh Museum. He made the colors stronger than the woodblock, and he filled the border with Japanese characters taken from other prints.

Why Cleveland has two

This is a woodblock, so there was never one original sheet. The edition was large. The exact count for this design was not written down. Each impression was printed by hand, and the gray of the sky was wiped onto the block, which is why one sheet is never quite the next. The two below are both at the Cleveland Museum of Art, both dated 1857. They are close. The useful difference is the darkness across the top of the sky, and how hard the rain lines read against it.

Using the photographs

Hiroshige died in 1858, so the print is in the public domain. Cleveland marks both of its photographs CC0. The download is the museum’s larger file. You can use either one for personal or commercial work, without asking the museum first.