Sleeping Young Woman with Mt. Fuji Above

This hand-colored hosoban sumizuri-e in the Art Institute of Chicago depicts a young woman asleep, her dream rising above her in the form of Mount Fuji, a poetic image that combines the bijin-ga tradition with the dream iconography familiar from East Asian painting. The juxtaposition of sleeping figure and mountain reads as a visual representation of an auspicious New Year's dream; tradition held that to dream of Mount Fuji, hawks, and eggplants at the start of the year promised good fortune for the year ahead, and Shigenaga's image plays directly on this folk belief. The sumizuri-e technique uses black ink alone, with the hand-applied color a later addition or a partial enhancement; the spare palette suits the dreamy quietness of the subject. The hosoban format compresses sleeper and dream-mountain into a single vertical reading. Shigenaga's late work in the 1740s frequently returned to such poetic figural subjects, and the Chicago impression demonstrates his continued ability to invent compositions that fused popular print conventions with deeper iconographic associations.