Evening Glow at Seta (Seta no sekisho), No. 1 from the series "Eight Views of Omi"

The first sheet of Shigenaga's Eight Views of Omi (Omi hakkei), this [hosoban](/glossary/hosoban) urushi-e in the Art Institute of Chicago depicts Evening Glow at Seta, the iconic view of the long Seta Bridge spanning the channel where Lake Biwa empties into the Seta River near Otsu. Seta no sekisho was one of the foundational landscape subjects of Japanese poetry and painting, valued for the long horizontal line of the bridge against the evening sky and the historical and military associations that clung to the site. Shigenaga's interpretation, made in the 1720s or 1730s, is hosoban in scale and works the landscape into a vertical narrow format by emphasizing the foreground figures who view the scene rather than the topographic panorama. The urushi-e technique adds lacquered ink and hand-applied beni to a printed keyblock; the result is a print that is small and intimate where later landscape [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) under Hokusai and Hiroshige would be [oban](/glossary/oban)-scale and panoramic. Shigenaga's series was ambitious for its moment and demonstrates how the Eight Views convention was being assimilated into ukiyo-e a full century before its full landscape flowering, with the Chicago impressions documenting the early stages of that long process.