Saigyo Hoshi gazing at Mt. Fuji

This hosoban urushi-e in the Art Institute of Chicago depicts the twelfth-century monk-poet Saigyo Hoshi (1118-1190) gazing at Mount Fuji, one of the most iconic subjects in Japanese poetic and visual culture. Saigyo, a Buddhist priest and waka master who had renounced the warrior life for a peripatetic religious vocation, was associated above all with his contemplative encounter with Fuji, and the image of him before the mountain was a standard figure for poetic enlightenment, religious resignation, and the relationship between Japanese landscape and Japanese verse. Shigenaga's treatment renders Saigyo as a small figure with traveling staff and the white robes of the wandering monk, with Mount Fuji's distinctive cone rising behind him; the hosoban format and urushi-e technique adapt the classical poetic subject to the format of the popular print. The mitate logic of mid-Edo ukiyo-e is implicit here: Saigyo is at once the historical poet and a model for any Edo viewer who might aspire to similar contemplative seriousness. The Chicago impression preserves the keyblock line and the urushi gloss in usable state and demonstrates Shigenaga's command of classical literary subjects.