Bridge in the Rain (after Hiroshige)

Credits: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

Van Gogh greatly admired Japanese woodcuts for their bright colors and distinctive compositions. He based this painting of a bridge in the rain on a print by the famous artist Utagawa Hiroshige. Van Gogh made the colors more intense than in the original, however. He painted this work on a standard size canvas. He wanted to maintain the proportions of the original print and so left a border, which he filled with Japanese characters copied from other prints.