A JAPANESE WOODBLOCK PRINT BY HIROSHIGE (1797 - 1858).

An oban yoko-e, 'Shono', the sub-title, Haku-u (Sudden Summer Shower) from Hoeido's Tokaido series, 'The Fifty-three Stations on the Tokaido Road', depicting travellers being caught by a sudden shower, and scurrying off to a hill slop, signed Hiroshige ga.

錦絵　安藤広重　庄野　東海道五十三次

This is the most famous of all Hiroshige's prints, not only for its innovative composition but also for the way it captures the essencial sentiments of the Japanese people.

Unlike the landscape prints by Hokusai, in which nature dominates over humans, human figures hold a tangible balance with landscape in Hiroshige's prints, evoking memories of the viewers, in the way no other Japanese artists achieved.

In this print, Hiroshige used a dynamic composition of a diagonal line of the hill cutting through the pouring rain also coming down diagonally from the dark sky. The contrast of the triangle-shaped shadows of moving trees and thatched roofs adds a rhythmical touch to the human figures running in opposite directions from each other.

Hiroshige designed fifty-five prints based on his sketches along the Tokaido highway on the trip to Kyoto from Edo in 1832, however his prints are not a realistic depiction of the post stations, but the creation of his own views of human life enhanced by the natural phenomena such as rain, snow and fog.