Returning Sails at Yabase (Yabase kihan), from an untitled series of Eight Views of Ōmi (Ōmi hakkei)

This 1854 woodblock print (nishiki-e) by Utagawa Fusatane, held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (object 201949), depicts Returning Sails at Yabase (Yabase kihan), another of the eight canonical scenes of Lake Biwa. Yabase was the small port on the southwestern shore of Lake Biwa from which boats crossed to the eastern shore at Ōtsu, and the returning-sails subject — boats with sails lowered or set for the homeward journey — had been one of the standard motifs of Chinese eight-view landscape painting since the Song dynasty before its adaptation to the Japanese Lake Biwa cycle in the fourteenth century. Fusatane's print follows the convention with boats running before the wind toward the Yabase shore, the masts and sails arranged for compositional effect against the open expanse of the lake. The print is in standard ōban single-sheet format. It is preserved in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston's collection of Japanese woodblock prints, a holding that contains one of the most comprehensive surveys of nineteenth-century ukiyo-e in the United States.