Bridge and Night Rain

This sansui-e (landscape print) by Andō Hiroshige IV depicts a wooden bridge in nocturnal rain and is documented in the Japanese Art Open Database with an explicit attribution to Hiroshige IV. The subject combines two of the most famous tropes of the Edo-period Hiroshige tradition — the bridge as a structuring vertical element within a watery landscape, and the night rain (yo no ame) as a moodily atmospheric weather condition — both of which had been canonised in Hiroshige I's earlier landscape series of the 1830s and 1840s, notably the Eight Views of Ōmi (Ōmi Hakkei) with its celebrated Karasaki Bridge at Night and the famous Ōhashi Bridge from the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. Hiroshige IV's treatment retains the diagonal sheets of incised rain lines, the lantern-lit illumination of figures crossing the bridge, and the deep ink-saturated upper sky that were hallmarks of the original Hiroshige nocturnal compositions. Working in the late Meiji or early Taishō period, Hiroshige IV consciously preserved the visual vocabulary of his great-great-predecessor while adapting it to the smaller scale and simpler colour palette characteristic of his own period. The print is preserved in the Japanese Art Open Database's image archive.