Utagawa Hiroshige

Utagawa Hiroshige, Evening Rain at Atake on the Great Bridge (Ohashi Atake no yudachi), no. 52 from the series One Hundred Views of Famous Places in Edo (Ohashi Atake no yudachi), 1857. Color woodblock print with traces of mica, 14 3/8 × 9 5/8 in. (33.7 × 22 cm). Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gift of Patricia Brown McNamara, Jane Brown Dunaway, and Helen Brown Jarman in memory of Mary Wattis Brown, 64.47.53

Rain as a motif in ukiyo-e prints was often shown as a series of black or gray lines to represent swirling gusts, heavy downpours, or gentle drops. It was most beautifully evoked in the prints of Utagawa Hiroshige, including this one in which a dark band of clouds seems to have opened up and released a torrent. This horizontal band of color in the sky, most often seen at the top of the sheet for a graded effect, was created with a technique called bokashi, in which the printer hand-wiped pigment onto the printing block. Bridges were also a popular subject in color woodcuts, particularly those by Hiroshige in his celebrated series One Hundred Views of Famous Places in Edo, published between 1856 and 1859. He featured all kinds of bridges as the subjects for his designs in this series, from the decorative moon bridges in temple and shrine gardens to bridges that served as main thoroughfares in Edo (present-day Tokyo). For this print, Hiroshige selected the Shin-Ohashi Bridge (in Atake, an Edo district) that still today spans the Sumida River flowing through central Tokyo.
Karin Breuer