Yabase no Kihan (Returning Sails at Yabase)

Yajima Gōgaku's treatment of the classical landscape subject Yabase no Kihan - Returning Sails at Yabase - draws on the Eight Views of Ōmi (Ōmi hakkei), the Japanese adaptation of the Chinese Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers that had been central to East Asian landscape painting since the Song dynasty. The Yabase ferry crossed the southern reach of Lake Biwa to the great post-station of Kusatsu, and the returning sails of evening were celebrated in poetry from at least the fifteenth century. Gōgaku's literati version, in the spare nanga manner with restrained colour and loose calligraphic line, presents the scene as an object of poetic contemplation rather than topographical record. The small colour woodcut, roughly 23 by 17 centimetres, was issued between 1810 and 1820.