Bridge in the rain, after Hiroshige

In Paris in 1887 a craze for Japanese woodblock prints had a French name of its own, Japonisme, and Vincent van Gogh had caught it badly. He collected the cheap coloured prints by the hundred and copied several in oil to teach himself how they worked. This is his version of a print by Utagawa Hiroshige showing figures hurrying across a wooden bridge under a sudden downpour. Van Gogh kept the steep Japanese composition and the slanting rods of rain, but pushed the colours far brighter than the original, framing the scene in a border of Japanese characters he copied from other prints without knowing what they said. A few years later that flattened light and bold colour would follow him south to Arles.