Gathering Shellfish at Low Tide at Susaki, from Famous Places in Edo (mid-1830s): Art, History and Details

Gathering Shellfish at Low Tide at Susaki, from Famous Places in Edo (mid-1830s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Utagawa Hiroshige (Japanese, 1797–1858).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Susaki, a strip of land along Edo (now Tokyo) Bay, was known for excellent shellfish harvests during low tide in the spring. Utagawa Hiroshige designed this print so that the viewer seems to be floating in the bay on board a ship, whose mast and rigging span the left foreground. Instead of depicting the lives of wealthy elites, this landscape focuses on the working-class people wading into shallow water to fill their baskets with shellfish. Susaki Shrine is shown amid pine trees on the right, while the leisure class enjoying the sea breezes from a pavilion are reduced to small figures in the background.

Object facts

• Title: Gathering Shellfish at Low Tide at Susaki, from Famous Places in Edo
• Date: mid-1830s
• Creator attribution: Utagawa Hiroshige (Japanese, 1797–1858)
• Culture: Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
• Type: Print
• Technique: color woodblock print
• Dimensions: Sheet: 22.3 x 34.7 cm (8 3/4 x 13 11/16 in.)
• Collection: Japanese Art
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1985.315

Collection credit

The Kelvin Smith Collection, given by Mrs. Kelvin Smith

Further reading listed by the museum

• “Checklist of the Kelvin Smith Bequest.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 75, no. 7 (September 1988): 292–295.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.