Rain of the Fifth Month (Samidare)

"Rain of the Fifth Month (Samidare)," held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession 51087) and dated by the Met to 1800, is an early seasonal subject attributed to Utagawa Kunisada. "Samidare," the long early-summer rain of the fifth lunar month, was one of the standard poetic and pictorial seasons in Edo culture, evoked endlessly in waka and haikai and a frequent backdrop for ukiyo-e figures sheltering under umbrellas or peering into rain-washed streets. The 1800 dating is early for Kunisada and may reflect either juvenile work or an approximate cataloging decision; the artist's most prolific decades fell after about 1810. As part of the Utagawa school descending from Toyoharu and Toyokuni I, Kunisada inherited a tradition that treated weather as a structural element of composition - rain lines, fog, and snow used to organize figures and define mood. The Met's impression participates in this broader Edo ukiyo-e seasonal idiom. Even read cautiously around the date, the sheet aligns with Kunisada's lifelong attention to mood and weather in figural prints, complementing the yakusha-e for which he became famous with a softer, atmospheric register.