Sudden Shower over Shin-Ohashi Bridge and Atake

Pedestrians hunch under a sudden downpour on the Shin-Ōhashi Bridge, the rain rendered as fine diagonal lines cutting across a grey river toward the distant Atake shore. Number 58 of Utagawa Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, it is the master's most celebrated single sheet, epitomizing his gift for weather, mood, and the poetry of the ordinary city. Vincent van Gogh admired it so deeply that he copied it in oil in 1887 as Bridge in the Rain, and the print's flattened, boldly cropped composition became a touchstone of Japonisme and a direct influence on Western modernism. Impressions are held at the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and elsewhere.