Studying Every Drop of Rain

A timber-framed house whose five rooms are all devoted to water. Upstairs on the left, a bearded scholar in a brown robe examines a glowing drop over a model landscape while a young man reads from a sheet, with hoops and droplets hanging from the rafters. The middle room is a greenhouse of hanging baskets, vines and clouds, where a gardener holds a pot and a boy carries a fishbowl. At right, a white-haired man reads papers at a desk under rainbows and a painted mountain valley while a child offers him a feather. Downstairs, a worker holds a giant drop beside a mosaic floor of looping arrows as another writes at a table with a goldfish jar. In the blue-tiled room, men tend long glass tanks beneath hanging jugs and world maps. Rainbows above and blue tanks below keep the upper and lower floors of the house easy to tell apart.