Rain Blossoms

Rain Blossoms (1928) is one of Lilian May Miller's most frequently reproduced color woodcuts and the image by which she is most often introduced in shin-hanga literature. The vertical sheet shows two figures crossing an arched wooden bridge in a sudden downpour, the brilliant orange-and-vermillion oil-paper umbrellas above them reading as the 'blossoms' of the title and standing in pictorial contrast to the silvered greys of the rain-soaked landscape, the silhouetted willow tree at the right margin, and the dark wet planks of the bridge. The print belongs to the central year of Miller's mature production (the 1928 group also includes Nikko Gateway, A Korean Shrine, and Japanese Dwarf Plum Tree) and combines a shin-hanga subject matter that Watanabe Shōzaburō's stable would have recognised — the woman-in-rain composition of Suzuki Harunobu and Itō Shinsui translated to the early Shōwa moment — with Miller's distinctively bilingual sensibility, in which a Western viewer's reading of 'blossoms' as a poetic conceit is layered over a Japanese craft tradition. Miller cut and printed the entire edition herself in her Tokyo studio, and impressions are now held in the Pacific Asia Museum, the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress and a number of private collections.