In the Japan of the Edo period (present-day Tokyo), "ukiyo-e" — "pictures of the floating world" — was the art of the urban public: cheap, widespread colour prints reproduced from woodblocks. Showing Kabuki actors, famous beauties, landscapes, and everyday life, these prints were not a single picture but a mass art circulating in hundreds of copies. After Katsushika Hokusai, the greatest landscape master of this tradition was Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858).

Hiroshige's 1857 print "Sudden Shower over the Great Bridge at Atake," from the series "One Hundred Famous Views of Edo," sums up his genius. A sudden summer rain has caught the people crossing the bridge; the rain is rendered with countless fine, sharp vertical lines descending from sky to ground — a bold and abstract solution never seen in Western painting until then. The composition is unusual: the bridge stretches diagonally across the canvas, a wide grey surface of water is left almost empty, the far shore dissolves in mist. The emptiness is as effective as the fullness.

These prints flowed into Europe with Japan's opening in the mid-nineteenth century and created a craze: "Japonisme." Western painters found in this visual language what they were seeking — flat fields of colour, bold cropping, asymmetrical composition, shadowless light, the elevation of the everyday moment. Van Gogh copied this very Hiroshige print directly in oils; Monet, Degas, Whistler, and many others drew on ukiyo-e.

Thus the visual languages of East and West made one of the most fruitful exchanges in history: the search of Impressionism and modern painting for "capturing the moment" and "planar composition" was born partly from the lines with which a Japanese print master drew the rain.