How Japanese Prints Influenced Artists Beyond Japan
A sudden shower crosses a bridge in Edo. People hurry beneath umbrellas as fine lines of rain sweep across the sky. In Utagawa Hiroshige’s Sudden Shower over Shin-Ohashi Bridge and Atake, the bridge cuts diagonally through the scene, and the weather seems to reach every corner of the print.
It is a small, passing moment. Yet Hiroshige gives it a rhythm all its own.
Japanese woodblock prints offered artists an extraordinary range of subjects: city life, performers, landscapes, changing seasons, and ordinary gestures. Their compositions could feel surprisingly close. A figure might be cut off by the edge of the picture. A tree might fill the foreground while the distant view peeks around it. Pattern and color could carry as much weight as depth and shadow.
When these prints became widely available in Europe during the nineteenth century, artists encountered ways of arranging an image that felt fresh to them. They did not all respond in the same way. Some studied the prints closely; others took a particular idea and made it their own.
A Bridge Seen Twice
Vincent van Gogh’s response to Hiroshige was direct. In 1887, he painted Bridge in the Rain (after Hiroshige), based on the Japanese artist’s shower scene.
Look between the two images. The bridge still runs across the picture at an angle. The rain still falls in long, insistent lines. But Van Gogh gives the scene his own stronger colors and a painted border. The result feels both recognizable and changed.
Van Gogh collected Japanese prints with his brother Theo, and Hiroshige was especially important to him. His painted version lets us see influence in motion: first an artist’s close attention to another work, then the choices he makes as he responds to it.
The Beauty of an Unexpected View
The connection is quieter in the work of Mary Cassatt.
Consider Kitagawa Utamaro’s Two Women. The figures are placed along a graceful diagonal, their forms meeting the edge of the print. Robes, hair, and open space each have a part in the composition. Before asking what the women are doing, we might simply follow the shapes that bring them together.
Cassatt saw a major exhibition of Japanese prints in Paris in 1890. Soon afterward, she made a series of color prints depicting women in moments of daily life. In Woman Bathing, we look down toward a woman bending over a basin. Her face is partly turned away. The patterned dress, the washstand, the basin, and the space around them all help shape our experience of this private moment.
Cassatt was not copying Utamaro’s Two Women. What she found in Japanese printmaking was a set of possibilities: an unusual viewpoint, an intimate subject, and a composition in which pattern could be expressive. She brought those possibilities into her own work.
More Than One Way to Respond
Other artists followed different paths. Edgar Degas explored asymmetrical compositions and unexpected angles. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec found inspiration in the bold contours and colors of Japanese prints for his posters. The influence moved through paintings and prints, but also into images made for the streets of Paris.
None of this means every striking crop or flat area of color came from Japan. Each artist had other influences, too. What makes this exchange so interesting is the chance to look closely at the individual works and see where a connection is especially clear.
Start again with Hiroshige’s rain. Follow the diagonal bridge, then notice the people crossing it. Look at Utamaro’s two figures and the space beside them. Afterward, return to Van Gogh or Cassatt. The subject may have changed, but perhaps you’ll recognize a new way of bringing a scene to life.
The Japanese prints are remarkable works in their own right. They also invite us to notice how an artist’s choices can travel, be studied, and become part of another artist’s imagination.
A Quiet Invitation
If this slower way of looking resonates with you, download our free guide, A Different Way to Experience Art. It is an invitation to spend more time with art—not by searching immediately for answers, but by noticing what you feel.
