The Treasure Ship

Held in the Art Institute of Chicago and dated to circa 1712, The Treasure Ship is a horizontal o-oban sumizuri-e print that depicts the takarabune, the legendary treasure ship of the seven gods of good fortune (shichifukujin), a subject of deep iconographic significance in Japanese New Year tradition. The takarabune was believed to bring the seven gods, with their attendant cargo of auspicious objects (the inexhaustible purse, the magic mallet, the lucky raincoat, sacred scrolls), into harbor each New Year, and prints of the subject were commonly placed under pillows on the second night of the year to induce auspicious dreams. Moromasa's composition arranges the ship and its divine passengers across the wide horizontal sheet in the kind of panoramic, frieze-like organization that Hishikawa Moronobu had developed for his daimyo processions and pleasure-quarter scenes. Printed in single-block black ink and hand-colored in the early eighteenth-century mode that preceded multi-block color printing, the work demonstrates Moromasa's command of the o-oban yoko-e format, a particularly ambitious horizontal sheet size suited to processional and narrative subjects. As one of Moromasa's earlier works, the print situates him squarely within the iconographic and compositional inheritance of the Hishikawa school during the late sumizuri-e era of early Edo ukiyo-e, when artists were extending Moronobu's foundational vocabulary into new subjects while maintaining his confident draftsmanship and dense patterning. The Art Institute of Chicago example helps document Moromasa's engagement with auspicious New Year imagery, a perennial commercial mainstay of the early-eighteenth-century print trade.