Gathering Shellfish at Low Tide at Susaki, from Famous Places in Edo

Gathering Shellfish at Low Tide at Susaki is a landscape print by Utagawa Hiroshige from around 1834, in the series Famous Places in Edo, and now held by the Cleveland Museum of Art. Susaki was a tidal flat at the mouth of the Sumida on the eastern edge of Edo, and the spring shio-higari, gathering shellfish on foot at low tide, was one of the favourite seasonal recreations of the city. Hiroshige treats the subject as a horizontal panorama. A broad expanse of exposed mud and shallow water fills the lower part of the sheet, dotted with small parties of figures bending to gather clams. The far shore of the bay carries pine trees and the silhouettes of boats; the sky opens out softly above. The composition is built almost entirely from bokashi gradation, with carefully managed transitions in water, sky, and sand. As an Edo ukiyo-e landscape print the design joins the long tradition of meisho-zue depictions of seasonal Edo pastimes, with the human figures treated as small punctuating elements within a much larger view of weather and place. The Cleveland Museum of Art's impression preserves one of Hiroshige's earlier and more lyrical treatments of an Edo subject, before the more vertical and dramatically cropped late style of the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. The print is collected both for its place in the artist's evolution and for its evocative seasonal subject.