Komachi at Sekidera (Sekidera Komachi), No. 5 from the series "Seven Komachi (Nana Komachi)"

Number five from Shigenaga's Seven Komachi (Nana Komachi) series, held at the Art Institute of Chicago, this hosoban beni-e depicts Komachi at Sekidera, one of the seven canonical episodes in the legend of Ono no Komachi, the ninth-century Heian poet and great beauty whose later years were imagined in Noh and other arts as a journey from youthful celebrity to aged wisdom. The Sekidera episode imagines an aged Komachi at the temple of that name, reciting poetry, and the subject was beloved of artists because it allowed the meditation on impermanence (mujo) central to Japanese aesthetics to be embodied in a single figure. Shigenaga, like Sukenobu and others of his generation, treated the Seven Komachi as a sustained narrative series and rendered each episode with the bijin-ga vocabulary of his period. Beni-e coloring applied a rose pigment derived from safflower as the dominant accent, with secondary colors brushed in around it. The Art Institute impression preserves enough of the beni to convey the original chromatic emphasis, though as always with hand coloring of this period the pigments have softened with age. The series demonstrates Shigenaga's literary range and his willingness to treat classical female subjects with the same seriousness as kabuki actors.