Two Children Begging Hotei for a Jewel

Two Children Begging Hotei for a Jewel by Isoda Koryusai is a playful encounter between the rotund god of contentment and a pair of small petitioners. Hotei, one of the Seven Gods of Good Fortune, is conventionally represented carrying a great cloth bag from which he distributes treasures to deserving children, and Koryusai stages exactly such a moment of giving here. The Cleveland Museum of Art preserves the impression that documents this design, assigning it to around 1770, in the most productive phase of Koryusai's career. The print belongs to a recurrent category in ukiyo-e in which the deities of popular religion appear at child-eye level as benevolent figures rather than as remote objects of veneration. Koryusai's handling of the subject combines the firm draftsmanship of his Edo bijin-ga with a softer, rounder line suited to children and to the cheerful body of the god, and the composition is organized so that the diagonal of Hotei's bag becomes the focal axis of the scene. The print sits within the same period that produced the courtesan portraits of the celebrated series Hinagata Wakana Hatsu Moyo, and it documents the breadth of Koryusai's subject matter. Religious figures, children, and the rhythms of household devotion were as central to his picture of Edo life as the famous beauties of the licensed quarter.