Returning Sails at Yabase (Yabase kihan), from the series "Fashionable Eight Views of Omi (Furyu Omi hakkei)"

This Art Institute of Chicago oban, dated c. 1814/17, depicts Yabase kihan — Returning Sails at Yabase — the eight-views scene of fishing boats returning at evening to the port of Yabase on the eastern shore of Lake Biwa. The image was a stock subject of Japanese landscape painting from the medieval period onward and a staple of the Omi-hakkei tradition. In Eizan's hands it becomes the framing reference for another bijin-ga sheet: a fashionable woman whose costume or pose acts as the place's avatar. The three Omi sheets in the Art Institute collection — Seta, Katada, and Yabase — give a strong sense of how Eizan organized the series visually, varying mood and setting across the eight while keeping a consistent figural type. As a group they are one of the most coherent Kikukawa-school sub-projects to have survived in Western collections.