A Bridge in the Rain: How a Dying Man's Print Crossed the World

In the autumn of 1887, in a rented room in Paris, Vincent van Gogh set up a canvas and began copying a print by Utagawa Hiroshige, brushstroke for brushstroke, down to an invented pseudo-Japanese script he added as a decorative border. The print was Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake, part of Hiroshige's late series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo ("Edo" was the city's name before it became Tokyo, and the setting for centuries of military rule under the Tokugawa shogunate). Van Gogh wasn't guessing at Japan from a distance. He was an obsessive, serious collector of ukiyo-e, the popular Japanese woodblock-print tradition Hiroshige worked in, and spent hours at Siegfried Bing's Paris gallery next door to his apartment, where thousands of Japanese prints were for sale. [1]

This collection holds three separate impressions of the very print he copied, each pulled by hand from the same 1857 woodblocks. [2] The Rijksmuseum holds one.

The Cleveland Museum of Art holds a second, its own catalog record noting it was published two years after the great Edo earthquake and fire of 1855, and showing the city's Great Bridge freshly rebuilt. [3]

And the Art Institute of Chicago holds a third, the one Van Gogh copied.

Hiroshige never knew any of what came next. He died in 1858, during the epidemic that killed some 28,000 people in Edo that year, though even his cause of death carries a note of uncertainty in the record, one of the small honest gaps historians still hold open. [4] Three years before he died, he had already retired from the world to become a Buddhist monk, and reportedly left a farewell poem: "I leave my brush in the East, and set forth on my journey." [5] Utagawa Kunisada, a fellow ukiyo-e artist, painted this memorial portrait of him the year he died, in the robes of the monk he had become. [6]

The prints that made him internationally famous were never meant to leave Japan. Ukiyo-e was popular, disposable art: cheap enough for ordinary residents of Edo to buy the way people bought newspapers.

By the 1870s, what had been disposable in Japan had become a name in France. The critic Philippe Burty coined the word *Japonisme* in 1872 to describe what was happening to a generation of painters, among them Monet, Degas, Whistler, and soon Van Gogh, as Japanese prints, ceramics, and textiles flooded into Paris in the years after Japan's forced reopening to the West. [7] Van Gogh's copy is the famous case. This collection holds two more, from painters who never picked up a brush to imitate Hiroshige, but who absorbed the habit of seeing that Japonisme was actually about.

Degas took it further than admiration. This collection holds what Minneapolis Institute of Art's own catalog record calls his most Japanese-inspired print: a narrow, up-tilted etching of Mary Cassatt at the Louvre, its cropped column, off-center figure, and bird's-eye angle drawn directly from Japanese compositions. It isn't a Japanese subject at all, just a Parisian woman at a museum, seen the way Degas had learned to see. [8]

That way of seeing took over a decade to build. It started in 1865, when Degas began frequenting a shop at 220 rue de Rivoli that Parisians nicknamed La Porte Chinoise, where a small circle, among them Édouard Manet, James McNeill Whistler, and the writer brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, gathered to look at Japanese prints newly arriving in the city. [9] He kept collecting for the rest of his life: by the time he died, his studio held more than one hundred ukiyo-e prints. [10]

Toulouse-Lautrec went a step further still. In 1893 he attended the first major Western retrospective of Japanese art held in Paris, and began trading his own paintings for the ukiyo-e prints he wanted, spending entire days at a print dealer's shop teaching himself to read Japanese signatures. [11] The habit changed how he signed his own work: the year before, in 1892, he'd adopted a small circular monogram, his initials compressed into a red seal modeled on the fittings of a Japanese sword hilt. [12] It's a strange, specific kind of homage, borrowing not just a style but the mark that says who made something.

This collection holds a lithograph from that same year: a theater program whose flat color and black outlines, per the Art Institute of Chicago's own record, achieve in color lithography the same effect Japanese woodcut technique gets from carving a separate block per color, and whose subject, women in Parisian theaters and cafes, deliberately echoes how Japanese printmakers had depicted the licensed pleasure quarters of the Yoshiwara. [13]

Eleven years after Burty coined the word, the printmaker Félix Buhot gave it a second life: in April 1883, timed to a major exhibition at the Georges Petit gallery, he published a portfolio of ten etchings titled simply Japonisme, made after Japanese objects in Burty's own private collection. [14]

This collection holds the printed covers of that exact portfolio, pulled in five different ink states: brownish-black, pure black, red, brown, blackish-blue, the work of a printmaker visibly working out, one proof at a time, how to render an idea that didn't yet have settled colors of its own. [15]

There's a real irony underneath all of it. The West fell for a version of Japan (flat color, a bridge in the rain, a rebuilt city after a disaster) at almost the exact moment Japan itself was racing to leave that world behind. The same decade Burty named Japonisme, the Meiji Restoration was dismantling the shogunate and building the railways of a modern industrial state. Europe was discovering "old Japan" through prints just as Japan was dismantling it from the inside.

Van Gogh's copy of Hiroshige's bridge is usually told as a story about one artist admiring another. It's really a story about an entire generation working the same seam differently: one painter who copied a print stroke for stroke, one who studied its structure for over a decade without ever imitating it directly, and one who borrowed not the image but the signature underneath it, a print made for pocket change in a city recovering from disaster, surviving its maker by decades, and landing in a dozen different studios in Paris the same generation a critic gave the whole phenomenon a name.

References

1. [1]Van Gogh's ukiyo-e collecting and proximity to Siegfried Bing's gallery. DailyArt Magazine and The Collector
2. [2]Object records: Rijksmuseum RP-P-1956-752, Cleveland Museum of Art 1921.318, Art Institute of Chicago 26545
3. [3]Cleveland Museum of Art curatorial record, object 1921.318
4. [4]Hiroshige's death and the 1858 Edo epidemic. Sotheby's
5. [5]Hiroshige's retirement as a Buddhist monk and farewell poem. Sotheby's
6. [6]Utagawa Kunisada's memorial portrait of Hiroshige, 1858. Donated by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to Wikimedia Commons under its Open Access policy; public domain (CC0)
7. [7]Philippe Burty coining "Japonisme," 1872. Tate
8. [8]Curatorial description of Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Paintings Gallery as Degas's most Japanese-inspired print. Minneapolis Institute of Art, object 8878
9. [9]Madame Desoye's shop La Porte Chinoise at 220 rue de Rivoli and its circle of collectors, including Degas, Manet, and Whistler. Minneapolis Institute of Art, object 8878; corroborating account of the shop and its customers: "How Japan Reshaped Western Art"
10. [10]Degas's collection of over 100 ukiyo-e prints by the time of his death. Minneapolis Institute of Art, object 8878
11. [11]Toulouse-Lautrec's attendance at the 1893 Exposition Rétrospective de l'Art Japonais and his print collecting. "Toulouse-Lautrec and His Japanese Influences," Pen
12. [12]Toulouse-Lautrec's 1892 circular monogram signature, modeled on Japanese sword-hilt fittings (tsuba). "The artist's signature: Toulouse-Lautrec," OUP Academic
13. [13]Art Institute of Chicago, object 67134, "The Hairdresser, Program for the Théâtre Libre"
14. [14]Félix Buhot's Japonisme portfolio and its source in Philippe Burty's own collection, published April 1883. Art Institute of Chicago, Palmer Museum of Art exhibition
15. [15]Art Institute of Chicago object 262015, part of the "Japonisme" portfolio, objects 262014–262021