Five Pictures of Low Tide, "Woman Tying Up Her Kimono"

Woman Tying Up Her Kimono, from Utagawa Kuniyoshi's series Five Pictures of Low Tide, depicts the everyday gesture of a woman gathering up her kimono in preparation for shiohigari, the popular low-tide pastime of collecting shellfish on the bay's tidal flats. The series belongs to Kuniyoshi's beauty-print output and demonstrates that the Edo ukiyo-e designer celebrated for his warrior prints was also a sensitive observer of contemporary feminine life and seasonal ritual. The Harvard Art Museums impression preserves the elegant figural drawing, careful textile patterning, and graceful posture that distinguish Kuniyoshi's bijin-ga, with the woman's bent figure and tucked-up sleeves rendered through the firm contour drawing he developed across his musha-e. Low-tide subjects had long-standing associations with early summer recreation, the seasonal calendar, and the Edo public's enthusiasm for outings to the shore. By concentrating on the prosaic preparatory gesture of tying up the kimono, Kuniyoshi brings observational immediacy to the genre, treating his subject as a particular woman engaged in a particular task rather than as an abstract type. The print can be productively compared with its companion sheet, Woman Digging for Clams, to study how Kuniyoshi handled the same body in different postures and the same seasonal subject in different narrative moments. As one of the great Utagawa-school designers, Kuniyoshi worked easily across the full spectrum of Edo ukiyo-e genres, and these low-tide beauties are a reminder that his contributions to the period extended well beyond the celebrated warrior prints. Source: Harvard Art Museums.