The Japanese woodblock artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858), often called the last great master of the color print called ukiyo-e, who made weather and travel his subject and taught his viewers to feel rain, snow, mist, and distance. His Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido captured the road between Edo and Kyoto in driving rain and muffled snow, and his late One Hundred Famous Views of Edo cropped the city with startling boldness. When his prints and Hokusai's reached Europe after Japan reopened, they helped ignite Japonisme and remade Western painting; Vincent van Gogh made oil copies of two of Hiroshige’s designs.
A traveler bends into a sudden downpour, the rain drawn as fine grey lines slashing straight down the paper, the bridge and the river behind dissolving into wet shadow. Utagawa Hiroshige designed that scene as a woodblock print in the 1850s, one of thousands of popular color prints he designed for ordinary buyers in Edo. He had made his name on the great highway, painting the post-stations between Edo and Kyoto in snow and fog and evening light, until he became known as the artist of rain, snow, and mist. Then Japan reopened to the world, and his prints poured into Europe. Painters there had never seen anything like the flat planes, the daring crops, the weather made visible. Vincent van Gogh made an oil version after that rain-bridge design, transforming its colors while studying its composition. A printmaker for the common people of Edo helped remake the art of the West.