Utamaro's pictures of abalone divers

The Japanese ukiyo-e artist Kitagawa Utamaro made a number of prints depicting ama divers—women whose work is to dive for shellfish or pearls—catching haliotis abalone sea snails.

Ukiyo-e art flourished in Japan during the Edo period from the 17th to 19th centuries, and took as its primary subjects courtesans, kabuki actors, and others associated with the "floating world" lifestyle of the pleasure districts.

[2] A prominent genre was bijin-ga ("pictures of beauties"), which depicted most often courtesans and geisha at leisure, and promoted the entertainments of the pleasure districts.

[3] Kitagawa Utamaro (c. 1753–1806) made his name in the 1790s with his bijin ōkubi-e ("large-headed pictures of beautiful women") portraits, focusing on the head and upper torso.

[4] He experimented with line, colour, and printing techniques to bring out subtle differences in the features, expressions, and backdrops of subjects from a wide variety of class and background.

[7] Utamaro and others played with these contrasts, portraying ama in elegant, resting poses as they often did with geisha, but nude and unkempt in their work environment.

[8] While Utamaro's supple, energetic, and vigorously healthy ama come across in a way erotic, his depictions of them differ from his often sexually explicit shunga.

[13] Utamaro employs a varied contrast of tones in the area of the rocks, while fine lines of the running current partially obscure the underwater scene.

[17] The French art critic Edmond de Goncourt compares these firgure to traditional Japanese representations of "dead souls coming to haunt the earth".

[19] Utamaro depicts a group of nude ama divers finishing a day of diving for haliotis abalone sea snails.

They appear soft-skinned and the contours of their exposed upper bodies have reddish outlines,[19] emphasizing their strong, corporeal figures at physical labour.

[26] Utamaro II makes a mitate-e parody of abalone hunting in Enoshima, where the fishing was done not by women but men (also called ama, but spelt with the characters 海士, "sea-man").

The picture depicts nude female ama (海女, "sea-woman") divers hunting for abalone as luxuriously-dressed women watch from a boat.