Station 50 -- Spring Rain at Tsuchiyama (Tsuchiyama, haru no ame), from the series Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō (Tōkaidō gojūsan-tsugi no uchi)

Station 50, Spring Rain at Tsuchiyama (Tsuchiyama, haru no ame) is one of the iconic landscape print designs from Utagawa Hiroshige's first great Tokaido series, the Hoeido edition of Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan-tsugi no uchi). Tsuchiyama, deep in the mountains of Omi Province between Minakuchi and Sakanoshita, was notorious among Edo-period travelers for its frequent rains, and Hiroshige seized on that local association to compose one of the most atmospheric weather images in all of Edo ukiyo-e. A line of porters and palanquin bearers leans into the downpour as they cross a small bridge over a swollen mountain stream, their straw rain capes and umbrellas catching the diagonal slashes of rain that Hiroshige carved as fine, parallel lines across the upper blocks. The dark, looming greens of the surrounding cedars compress the road, and the bridge becomes the sheet's pictorial fulcrum. The Harvard Art Museums impression preserves the saturated blacks of the storm clouds and the carefully printed rain lines that give the design its driving, kinetic effect.