Couple Conjuring Up a Horse and Rider (parody of Tekkai [Chinese: Li Tieguai] and Chokaro [Chinese: Zhang Guo Lao])

Couple Conjuring Up a Horse and Rider, dated 1767 and held at the Art Institute of Chicago, is one of Isoda Koryusai's most inventive parody compositions, a witty mitate that reframes two Chinese Daoist immortals — Tekkai (Li Tieguai) and Chokaro Sennin (Zhang Guo Lao) — as a modern Edo couple. In the traditional Chinese imagery, Tekkai blows his disembodied spirit out of his body in a vapor cloud, while Chokaro releases a tiny horse from a gourd, miraculously enlarging it back to full size. Koryusai redistributes these signature miracles to a fashionable young pair, allowing one figure to puff out a magical breath while the other draws a horse and rider from a small vessel. The print belongs to the rich Edo tradition of immortal-parody mitate-e, in which sacred Daoist iconography was domesticated into urbane comedy without losing its visual power. Koryusai's choice to pair the two miracles rather than depicting either immortal alone heightens the witty conjunction. As with much of his Edo bijin-ga, the figures themselves are drawn with the fluent contour line and patient attention to costume that became his signature, while the magical vapors and miniature horse give the designer license to deploy the kinds of decorative cloud bands and animal motifs that delighted print buyers. Years before he organized the multi-sheet pageantry of Hinagata Wakana no Hatsumoyo, Koryusai was already coaching his audience to read figures simultaneously as contemporary people and as classical references. The Chicago impression preserves an elegant example of his marriage of religious-mythological allusion and Meiwa-era genre style.