Abalone Divers off the Coast of Ise, from an Untitled Landscape Series
1834
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
About the artist
1834
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
Abalone Divers off the Coast of Ise, from an Untitled Landscape Series is a 1834 by Utagawa Kunisada, a Romanticism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
Three women dive in dark blue waves, their bodies half-hidden under the water. One holds a knife, another clutches a shell, while the third surfaces with a gasp. These divers, called *ama*, worked in Ise for centuries. They free-dived without oxygen, harvesting abalone for food and its shimmering shell. The print shows the job’s rhythm—dive, cut, rise—all in one quiet scene. Look up *japan, edo period (1615–1868)* to see more prints of daily work like this.
Prolific printmaker Utagawa Kunisada produced this seascape of abalone fishing as part of a series of untitled landscape prints in the early Tenpō era (1830–44). In the coastal city of Ise on Japan’s main island of Honshu, female divers called ama traditionally did the physically demanding job of harvesting shellfish such as abalone. These marine snails are valuable for their edible flesh, and their iridescent inner shell is a source of mother-of-pearl. This print depicts three stages of the harvest: One diver plunges into the water, another holds her breath while prying an abalone off the…
Read the full account in the museum source.
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