Gifts of the Ebb Tide (Shiohi no tsuto)

Gifts of the Ebb Tide (Shiohi no tsuto), a Kitagawa Utamaro project of about 1789 in the Harvard Art Museums, is one of his most celebrated illustrated book collaborations. Shiohi no tsuto, sometimes translated as 'gifts from the ebb tide', is a kyoka anthology illustrated with images of seashells and women collecting them along the seashore. The book combines comic verse, natural history, and Edo bijin-ga in a luxurious printed object intended for a connoisseur audience. Utamaro's role was to design illustrations in which carefully observed shells share the page or facing pages with women whose elegant gestures evoke the beach excursions traditional to certain seasons of the Edo year. The drawings of the shells reveal his sustained interest in close natural observation, parallel to his contemporary insect and bird-and-flower books, while the female figures are unmistakably in his ukiyo-e bijin-ga idiom. As a whole, Shiohi no tsuto demonstrates how Kitagawa Utamaro could integrate scientific illustration, poetic anthology, and woodblock printing of the highest quality into a single project. Harvard Art Museums holds material from this important book, allowing close study of the printing and pigment work that distinguished Tsutaya Juzaburo's publishing standards at the time. For collectors of Kitagawa Utamaro and of luxury Edo kyoka books, the project is a benchmark for what ukiyo-e could achieve when allied with poetry and natural history.