The 50 × 40 cm giclée print of Hiroshige's Shōno at original size, unframed, shown flat with its white border

Utagawa Hiroshige – Shōno: Driving Rain, c. 1833 | Giclée Print

50 × 40 cm / 19.7 × 15.7 in — Original size, 1:1
CHF 59.00
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The 50 × 40 cm giclée print of Hiroshige's Shōno at original size, unframed, shown flat with its white border
  • The 50 × 40 cm giclée print of Hiroshige's Shōno at original size, unframed, shown flat with its white border
  • Utagawa Hiroshige, Shōno: Driving Rain, c. 1833 — the woodblock sheet reproduced whole, rain crossing at two angles over bearers on a hillside path
  • Hiroshige's Shōno as a 70 × 50 cm giclée print, unframed, hung 25 cm above a 140 cm sideboard
  • Detail at actual print size: the bearers under their straw capes, the rain printed from two blocks crossing at different angles
  • The 50 × 40 cm giclée print of Hiroshige's Shōno at original size, unframed, shown flat with its white border
  • Utagawa Hiroshige, Shōno: Driving Rain, c. 1833 — the woodblock sheet reproduced whole, rain crossing at two angles over bearers on a hillside path
  • Hiroshige's Shōno as a 70 × 50 cm giclée print, unframed, hung 25 cm above a 140 cm sideboard
  • Detail at actual print size: the bearers under their straw capes, the rain printed from two blocks crossing at different angles
Utagawa Hiroshige – Shōno: Driving Rain, c. 1833 | Giclée Print

Utagawa Hiroshige – Shōno: Driving Rain, c. 1833 | Giclée Print

CHF 59.00
Size

Rain falls in two directions at once. Hiroshige printed it from two separate blocks, one set of lines crossing the other at a different angle, so the shower reads as wind rather than weather. Nothing in the picture is still: the bamboo grove bends away up the slope, the hillside behind is a wash of grey with no outline at all, and the path itself tilts.

Two groups pass each other going opposite ways, and neither looks up. Bearers carry a covered kago uphill; below them a man runs with a straw cape over his head and another has turned his umbrella into a roof. The umbrella carries the publisher's advertisement — Hiroshige put the shop's name in the middle of the storm, which is either commerce or a joke.

This is Shōno, the forty-fifth station of the Tōkaidō, and it is the print people mean when they say Hiroshige understood rain. In the impression reproduced here the dark band across the top is still deep and evenly graded — the first thing to go in later pulls, when the block was tired and the printer was in a hurry.

Scale
The sheet Hiroshige printed measures 24.2 × 36.2 cm. Both our sizes are calculated from it, and the factor is named.

Original: 24.2 × 36.2 cm / 9.5 × 14.3 in — ōban yoko-e, Art Institute of Chicago
50 × 40 cm / 19.7 × 15.7 in — original size, 1:1. Image 36.20 × 24.47 cm.
70 × 50 cm / 27.6 × 19.7 in — enlarged, 1.6× original. Image 58.80 × 39.74 cm.

The Chicago digitisation carries 546 dpi at original size and 336 dpi at the larger sheet — both above the 300 dpi we hold as the floor, and the 1.6× enlargement is inside the 1.8× ceiling we apply to line-based works. Nothing is upscaled.

Both sheets are metric; the inch figures are exact conversions rather than US nominal sizes. Nearest standard frames: 20 × 16 in and 28 × 20 in.

Provenance
Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858), Shōno: Driving Rain (Shōno hakuu), from the series Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō (Tōkaidō gojūsan tsugi no uchi), also known as the Hōeidō Tōkaidō, c. 1833–34; colour woodblock print, ōban yoko-e, 24.2 × 36.2 cm.
The Art Institute of Chicago, Clarence Buckingham Collection, Acc. No. 1925.3553.
Public domain. Open-access image released by the museum under CC0.

The print
Giclée on 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, twelve pigment inks. White border, optical centre. The tone of the aged paper is kept, not corrected away. Unframed. Shipped rolled in a tube.

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