Woman Diver Combing her Hair

Woman Diver Combing her Hair, dated 1786 in the Cleveland Museum of Art's catalogue, is a problematic early attribution to Utagawa Kunisada, who was born only in 1786 (lunar calendar 1785) and so could not have designed it himself. The Cleveland date almost certainly reflects a cataloguing convention from an earlier era or an attribution to a workshop figure in the broader Utagawa lineage to which Kunisada eventually belonged. Read as a Kunisada-school print, the subject is one that recurs across his career: the ama, the female pearl diver of the coast, depicted half-dressed and engaged in the intimate ritual of combing her wet hair. Such subjects were a vehicle for both bijinga elegance and a tacit eroticism that audiences appreciated, and Kunisada returned to the ama motif in his mature output. The compositional logic - a single figure with her hair loose, holding a comb, with abbreviated indications of shore, basket, or water - was standardized within Edo ukiyo-e by Kitagawa Utamaro and was inherited and elaborated by the Utagawa designers who succeeded him. The figural style of the print can be assessed against Kunisada's documented work for clues to its precise dating. Cleveland's holding of nineteenth-century Utagawa-school bijinga is substantial, and its catalogue entries help researchers continue to refine attributions within the Toyokuni / Kunisada workshop that defined Edo ukiyo-e for the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century.