The Poet Ise Looking Up at a Flock of Returning Geese, from an untitled series of eight views

The Poet Ise Looking Up at a Flock of Returning Geese, from an untitled series of eight views, is an early 1760s hosoban mizu-e color woodblock print at the Art Institute of Chicago. Lady Ise (active c. 875-940) was one of the great female poets of the Heian court, included among the Thirty-Six Immortal Poets, and remembered above all for the emotional acuity of her waka. The motif of returning geese - one of the standard topics in Eight Views series adapted from Chinese landscape painting - is matched here with a poet whose verse meditated on longing and distance. This double-layered reference, combining the Eight Views tradition with the figure of a celebrated woman poet, is exactly the kind of literary mitate that Shigemasa specialized in: classical poetic imagery transposed into a floating-world print for an audience that prided itself on cultivated reading. The hosoban format and mizu-e treatment date the print to the same productive moment as the Sumida views. The Art Institute of Chicago's holdings of these early hosoban prints constitute one of the most complete records of Shigemasa's formative work outside Japan.