Passing Rains on the Bay

An album-format landscape from Hokkai's 1906 hundred-landscapes series, Passing Rains on the Bay captures a moment of transient atmospheric drama as a curtain of rain sweeps across a coastal inlet. The composition is divided horizontally into three registers — a dark foreground of low hills crowned by a stand of trees, a middle band of pale water where a small fishing boat rides, and a high cloud-shrouded distance — that together describe a single weather event unfolding in space. Hokkai uses graded ink washes to render the rain itself as a slanting veil, leaving the silk progressively cooler and lighter as the eye moves into the storm. The brushwork in the foreground trees retains the calligraphic economy of the Nanga literati tradition, while the meteorological accuracy of the rain band reflects the painter's training as a forester accustomed to reading weather across landscape. The work is now held in the Freer Gallery of Art, part of the major Taniguchi gift of 1976.