American Art Collaborative

Between 1856 and 1859, Hiroshige made 118 woodblock prints for his series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, comprising landscapes and genre scenes in the Japanese city of Edo, known today as Tokyo. Here Hiroshige depicts the Shin-Ohashi (New Great) Bridge over the Sumida River, with Edo’s Atake neighborhood visible in the distance behind it. Hiroshige was a master of ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the floating world,” a print genre used to illustrate scenes of urban life and leisure that grew in popularity over the course of the eighteenth century and reached its apex with Hiroshige. His use of flat masses of color—seen in the river and sky of Evening Shower—and the soft gradation of tone in the clouds and the water under the bridge instill a sense of atmospheric mood.