Five Pictures of Low Tide, "Woman Beside an Anchor with a Flounder"

This sheet from Five Pictures of Low Tide by Utagawa Kuniyoshi belongs to a small group of mid-career bijin-ga that demonstrate the artist's range beyond the warrior prints and musha-e for which he is chiefly remembered. The composition shows a young woman standing beside a great iron anchor on the foreshore, a flounder held casually in her hand, the receding tide leaving a glistening expanse of beach behind her. Kuniyoshi exploits the contrast between the massive industrial form of the anchor and the soft fall of the woman's robes to give the image a quiet drama, while the flounder—prized in Edo cookery—anchors the scene in the everyday life of the Edo coast. Trained in the Utagawa school under Toyokuni I, Kuniyoshi shared with his teacher and his fellow pupil Kunisada a fascination with the figure of the modish urban woman, but he tends here toward a more naturalistic profile and a more atmospheric setting. The Harvard Art Museums impression illustrates the kind of low-key colors—muted blues, sand tones, dull rust—that distinguish his later seascapes. As part of an Edo ukiyo-e oeuvre dominated by ferocious warrior prints, this contemplative low-tide image reveals the breadth of Kuniyoshi's interests and his ability to translate the same dynamic compositional sense into a quieter genre.