Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake (Ōhashi Atake no yūdachi), from the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei)
Utagawa Hiroshige Japanese
Not on view
The heavens open. The sudden shower, a favorite subject of Edo haiku poets and ukiyo-e artists, is often depicted with a crisscrossing pattern of fine lines of rain—a difficult woodblock technique. Here, the netlike pattern is superimposed over an intensely focused image of Ōhashi (the Great Bridge), which crosses the Sumida River.
Utagawa Hiroshige, one of Japan's foremost landscapists, designed two extremely popular series: Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō and One Hundred Famous Views of Edo.