Jurōjin

Jurōjin (寿老人) is a hanging-scroll painting by Kanō Hōgai in ink and colour on silk, held by the Sen-oku Hakukokan Museum in Sakyō-ku, Kyoto. Dated to the late 1870s or early 1880s — the documentation gives a window of 1877 to 1886, with most authorities placing it about 1882 — the painting depicts Jurōjin, one of the Seven Lucky Gods (Shichifukujin) of Japanese folk religion. Jurōjin is traditionally shown as a small, elderly figure with an elongated bald head, white beard, and the staff and scroll that mark him as a Daoist immortal of long life; he is often accompanied by his sacred deer. Hōgai treats the subject in the Kanō figural tradition his master Kanō Shōsen'in Tadanobu had used for similar Daoist immortals, with confident linear drawing, restrained colour, and an attention to the deity's slightly humorous expression that places the work within a long tradition of Edo-period Kanō treatments of Lucky Gods imagery. The painting is one of the most accessible Hōgai works in any Japanese collection outside Tokyo and shows the artist working in the traditional Kanō manner before his synthesis with Western technique reached its mature form under Ernest Fenollosa.