Yui: Drying Nets by the Sea, by Utagawa Kuniyoshi | 東海道五十三對 由井

The Tokaido Gojusan Tsui was one of the grandest print projects of the late Edo period: the fifty-three stations of the great highway, divided among the three leading ukiyo-e artists of the day. Utagawa Kuniyoshi (歌川国芳) took the stations that called for warriors and beauties, and this design for Yui, made around 1844 to 1847, is one of his finest contributions to the series.

Yui, in present-day Shizuoka, is a fishing town facing Suruga Bay, famous for its beach-seine fishery. Kuniyoshi draws a local woman at her work, skillfully drying or mending a great fishing net that fills the upper part of the sheet with its sweeping diagonal lines. Behind her rises the silhouette of Mount Fuji under drifting evening clouds, for the nearby Satta Pass was celebrated as the finest viewpoint of the mountain along the entire Tokaido.

Kuniyoshi is remembered for his dynamic warrior designs and his humorous caricatures, but this print shows his hand at its most graceful. The woman's blue kimono, on close inspection, is patterned with fish-scale waves and a grid of net mesh, a shibori-like design that matches her work with an elegant, knowing fashion sense worthy of the seaside.

A cartouche at the upper corner carries a detailed account of the history of the village, making the print a small encyclopedia of Yui as well as a portrait of the healthy, unforced beauty of a woman at work by the sea. It is ukiyo-e travel and craftsmanship in a single, luminous sheet.