Descending Geese at Katada (Katada no rakugan), No. 7 from the series "Eight Views of Omi"

The seventh print in Shigenaga's Eight Views of Omi, this hosoban urushi-e at the Art Institute of Chicago depicts Katada no rakugan, descending geese at Katada, on the western shore of Lake Biwa. The descending-geese motif, borrowed from the Chinese Xiao-Xiang Eight Views, evokes autumn migration and the melancholy of seasonal passage; in the Omi adaptation it is anchored to the specific site of Katada, then a fishing village. Shigenaga handles the subject by setting bijin figures in the foreground while the geese descend toward the lake in the middle distance, a compositional strategy that translates the topographic theme into something legible as a bijin-ga and that allowed the print to function commercially within the Edo market for figure prints. The urushi-e technique gives the dark robes and hair the characteristic lacquered sheen and adds beni and supplementary pigments to the textiles. As one of Shigenaga's most ambitious series, the Omi hakkei demonstrates the way ukiyo-e was assimilating classical landscape iconography long before Hokusai and Hiroshige made it the dominant subject of the print.