Gathering Shells at Low Tide at Susaki; from the series 100 Views of Famous Places in Edo

This 1837 landscape print by Utagawa Hiroshige captures a seasonal ritual of Edo townspeople: gathering shells at low tide off Susaki, the broad mudflats that fanned out from the eastern edge of the city into Edo Bay. Shiohi-gari, the spring tideland outing, drew families and pleasure parties to spend the day digging clams, scooping seaweed, and picnicking on the temporarily exposed flats that the receding tide laid bare for a few hours each lunar month. Hiroshige composes the scene with a high horizon and a wide, mottled foreground in which figures bend, wade, and chatter in carefully observed postures. Distant sails dot the bay, and the silhouettes of fishing villages and the low forested rise of Boso emerge through a band of soft atmospheric blue. The print is an early example of Hiroshige's interest in mass leisure as a worthy subject of Edo ukiyo-e, and it documents a coastal landscape that would be entirely effaced by twentieth-century land reclamation around present-day Koto Ward. The Cleveland Museum of Art preserves this sheet among its holdings of Hiroshige's meisho-e of the Edo region, where it sits as a counterpoint to the artist's later, more famous One Hundred Famous Views of Edo of the 1850s.