Rain, Auvers

Painted at Auvers-sur-Oise in June 1890, this panoramic landscape is one of Van Gogh's most distinctive treatments of rain. The work translates the visual experience of a downpour into a rhythmic system of diagonal parallel lines that structure the entire canvas. He had been deeply influenced by Japanese woodblock prints — particularly Hiroshige's rain scenes — since his Paris years, and here that influence achieves its fullest pictorial expression in oil paint. Now at the National Museum Cardiff in Wales, it is among the most formally inventive works of his final weeks.

Diagonal streaks of grey-white rain slash across the entire canvas, imposed as a graphic layer over the undulating green and yellow field below. The technique is almost printerly in its regularity — a direct translation of Hiroshige's engraved rain lines into paint. The effect creates a shimmering, screen-like separation between the viewer and the landscape.