Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake

The artwork

A summer storm pours rain in fine lines over the great wooden bridge, and people run for cover under straw hats and mats. You receive it printed on handmade Amalfi paper, in a handmade frame.

• The black sky, the dense rain, the blue river and the pale wood of the bridge.
• An image full of movement that gives character to a study or an entrance hall.
• A gift for anyone who loves Van Gogh and the Japanese prints that inspired him.

Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), the best loved landscape artist of Japan, published it in 1857 in the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, the series devoted to the city we now call Tokyo. The bridge crossed the Sumida River, and Atake was the area on the opposite bank. In Japanese this rain has a name, yūdachi: the shower of summer evenings, which darkens the sky all of a sudden and then quickly passes. Hiroshige renders it with hundreds of fine lines cut into the wood, and adds a lone boatman poling his raft down the river as if the storm had nothing to do with him.

The Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh copied it in oils in 1887, and his picture is now in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Our reproduction comes from the impression in the Brooklyn Museum in New York.

Hung in a study, it brings home the sound of the rain and the calm of watching it from somewhere dry. It is a refined gift for anyone who loves Japanese art.

Unique quality material

Print on handmade Amalfi paper
Sheet size: 29 x 42 cm (11.4 x 16.5 in)
With frame: 31 x 44 cm (12.2 x 17.3 in)
Material: artwork printed on very fine handmade Amalfi paper with deckled edges
Frame: dark brown with gold fillet, handmade, with glass