Women Viewing Scroll Paintings of the Gods of Good Fortune

Women Viewing Scroll Paintings of the Gods of Good Fortune, held by the Art Institute of Chicago, is one of Chobunsai Eishi's interior genre compositions, in which a group of contemporary beauties is shown examining hanging scrolls depicting the Seven Gods of Good Fortune (Shichifukujin). The motif belongs to a tradition of pictures-within-pictures that allowed printmakers to package multiple subjects into a single sheet: the bijin in the foreground supplied the fashion content, while the scrolls supplied iconographic interest and auspicious meaning. The Seven Gods of Good Fortune were a popular New Year subject, often shown in temples, on hanging scrolls displayed at home in the first month of the year, and in the takarabune (treasure ship) prints exchanged for auspicious dreams. Eishi's beauties here perform the role of cultivated viewers, modeling the kind of refined visual literacy that his largely upper-class clientele wished to identify with. The composition gives him scope to deploy his characteristic slender figures across a broad horizontal arrangement, with the scrolls supplying vertical counterweights. Trained originally in the Kano studio under Eisen'in Michinobu before turning to [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e), Eishi handled this kind of double-register subject with unusual ease: he could draw the scrolls and figures with equal authority, knowing both pictorial traditions from the inside. The Art Institute of Chicago's catalogue dates the print to the late eighteenth century. The piece illustrates how his Edo [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) absorbed not only fashion but also viewing habits, presenting beauty in the act of contemplating image-making itself.