The 40 × 50 cm giclée print of Hiroshige's Sudden Shower, unframed, shown flat with its white border

Utagawa Hiroshige – Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake, 1857 | Giclée Print

40 × 50 cm / 15.7 × 19.7 in — Original size, 1:1
CHF 59.00
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The 40 × 50 cm giclée print of Hiroshige's Sudden Shower, unframed, shown flat with its white border
  • The 40 × 50 cm giclée print of Hiroshige's Sudden Shower, unframed, shown flat with its white border
  • Utagawa Hiroshige, Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake, 1857 — the woodblock sheet reproduced whole, black rain lines falling across a wooden bridge, the deep sky band and the blue water unfaded
  • Hiroshige's Sudden Shower as a 50 × 70 cm giclée print, unframed, hung 25 cm above a 140 cm sideboard
  • Detail at actual print size: figures running over the bridge under the crossed rain lines, printed from two separate blocks
  • The 40 × 50 cm giclée print of Hiroshige's Sudden Shower, unframed, shown flat with its white border
  • Utagawa Hiroshige, Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake, 1857 — the woodblock sheet reproduced whole, black rain lines falling across a wooden bridge, the deep sky band and the blue water unfaded
  • Hiroshige's Sudden Shower as a 50 × 70 cm giclée print, unframed, hung 25 cm above a 140 cm sideboard
  • Detail at actual print size: figures running over the bridge under the crossed rain lines, printed from two separate blocks
Utagawa Hiroshige – Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake, 1857 | Giclée Print

Utagawa Hiroshige – Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake, 1857 | Giclée Print

CHF 59.00
Size

Rain is drawn as rain: thousands of straight black lines cut across the sheet at two slightly different angles, printed from two blocks so the downpour crosses itself. Below it people run over a wooden bridge with mats and umbrellas over their heads, and a raft drifts on grey water. Nobody looks up.

Hiroshige made it in 1857, the year before he died, for One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. Thirty-odd years later Vincent van Gogh copied it in oil, line for line, and added a red border of invented Japanese characters. He was not quoting a famous picture — at the time it was a cheap sheet from a print shop.

What this is. A giclée reproduction of the Metropolitan Museum's impression, printed with pigment inks. It is not a woodblock print and is not sold as one — a woodblock print is pulled by hand from cut cherry blocks, and the good impressions are in museums.

Scale
Original: 36.5 × 24.3 cm / 14.4 × 9.6 in — Metropolitan Museum of Art
40 × 50 cm / 15.7 × 19.7 in — Original size, 1:1
50 × 70 cm / 19.7 × 27.6 in — Enlarged, 1.7× original

At original size the sheet is exactly the ōban format a buyer in Edo held. Enlarged, the rain lines separate into two distinct falls and the woodgrain of the block comes up through the sky — a different picture, and a deliberate one.

The sheet is reproduced whole, including the title cartouche and the publisher's seals. Nothing is cropped away but the museum's mount.

Provenance
Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858), Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake (Ōhashi Atake no yūdachi), from the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei), 1857; woodblock print, ink and colour on paper, 36.5 × 24.3 cm.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1918, Acc. No. JP644.
Public domain. The Museum publishes its digitisation under Open Access (CC0).

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

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