How do you draw rain? Hiroshige's answer was to carve it — fine, straight lines in two slightly different angles, slicing across the whole picture. You can almost hear it drumming on the hats of the people rushing across the bridge.

This is one of the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, a series Hiroshige made near the end of his life, showing the city that would become Tokyo through weather, seasons and everyday moments.

Thirty years later, Vincent van Gogh loved it so much he painted a copy in oil, around 1887, with a bright border of Japanese characters he copied without being able to read them. He was trying to learn how Japanese artists flattened space and used bold outlines and colour, lessons that ended up in his own most famous work.

It is a print about a few seconds of a wet afternoon in 1857, and it still feels like weather.