Abalone Divers off the Coast of Ise, from an Untitled Landscape Series

From an untitled landscape series, this Utagawa Kunisada print depicting abalone divers off the coast of Ise dates to about 1830 and belongs to the Cleveland Museum of Art's holdings of Edo ukiyo-e. Kunisada is rarely the first artist named in connection with landscape, that field belongs to Hokusai and Hiroshige, but his work in the genre during the late 1820s and 1830s shows a designer engaging seriously with topographical and seasonal subjects. The ama, women divers, of Ise were a stock literary and pictorial subject going back centuries, charged with associations of beauty, danger, and the sea's bounty. Kunisada gives the figures the substantial bodies of his bijinga, but he sets them against rocky coast and printed sea in a way that lets the landscape carry weight. The composition reflects the late Edo taste for landscape with figures, in which celebrities of nature, like famous shores, were treated with the same nigao care the artist usually reserved for actors. The Cleveland catalogue preserves the attribution and rough date, important markers for a sheet from a series whose full title and publisher have not been securely identified. As a window onto the breadth of Kunisada's practice within Edo ukiyo-e, before his elevation to the Toyokuni III name in 1844, the print shows him willing to compete with Hokusai and Hiroshige in territory those artists had largely claimed.