Utagawa Hiroshige.

Hiroshige is the poet of rain and snow. Where Hokusai sought structure, he sought atmosphere: the slanting downpour that streaks the sky, the evening mist, the silence of a bridge under the storm. His skies, graded from dark to light, invented a weather of their own in print.

The son of a fireman in a lord's service, he first took on his father's duty before devoting himself to engraving. His journey of 1832 along the Tōkaidō road, from Edo to Kyōto, gave him the material of the Fifty-three Stations that made his fame.

The One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, including the « Sudden Shower over Atake Bridge », closed his career in 1857. Van Gogh copied two of them in oil, fascinated by those bold framings in which a tree trunk or a bridge cuts the image in the foreground.

Galerie Yanaka has shown Hiroshige's work since 2019, attentive to the landscape series of his final years.