Descending Geese at Katada (Katada rakugan), from the series "Eight Views of Omi (Omi hakkei)"

Descending Geese at Katada is a 1857 landscape print by Utagawa Hiroshige drawn from his late vertical series Eight Views of Omi (Omi hakkei), the traditional set of celebrated landscape subjects around Lake Biwa. Each of the Eight Views pairs a place around the lake with a canonical motif (autumn moon, evening bell, returning sails, descending geese, and so on), in a poetic cycle that originated in Chinese landscape painting and was thoroughly absorbed into Japanese visual culture. Katada, on the western shore of Lake Biwa, is associated with the motif of descending geese. Hiroshige's composition arranges a V-shaped formation of birds slanting down through a soft sky toward the calm surface of the lake, with the Ukimido pavilion of Mangetsu-ji projecting on stilts from the shore. The Edo ukiyo-e landscape print here is at its most lyrical, with the bokashi gradation of sky doing as much expressive work as the placement of the birds. Hiroshige had treated the Eight Views several times over his career; the 1857 vertical series is the most ambitious and was published by Uoya Eikichi. An impression of the Katada sheet is held by the Art Institute of Chicago among its Hiroshige holdings, where the print can be studied alongside other treatments of the same canonical motif.