A Court Lady as Daikoku, from the series "Seven Women as the Gods of Good Fortune for the Hanagasa Poetry Club (Hanagasaren shichifukujin)"

Dated about 1820 and held by the Art Institute of Chicago (accession 1954.720), this Katsukawa Shuntei [shikishiban](/glossary/shikishiban) [surimono](/glossary/surimono) is one impression from the series Seven Women as the Gods of Good Fortune for the Hanagasa Poetry Club (Hanagasaren shichifukujin). The series is a witty mitate (parody or transformation) that depicts seven female figures in the roles of the Seven Lucky Gods (Shichifukujin), the popular pantheon of New Year deities — Daikoku, Ebisu, Bishamon, Benzaiten, Fukurokuju, Jurōjin, and Hotei — whose imagery dominated the cultural production of early-Edo new-year celebrations. This impression features a court lady in the role of Daikoku, the god of wealth and harvest who in his standard pictorial form appears as a smiling old man seated on rice bales with a mallet. The mitate convention permitted late-Edo print culture to transform sacred or canonical imagery into playful contemporary forms — here, by substituting elegant female figures for the conventional male deities, the series provides simultaneously a New Year's auspicious image and a sophisticated literary joke. The Hanagasaren (Flower-Hat Society) was a poetry club, one of the many private literary networks that commissioned surimono in the Bunka and Bunsei eras, and the print itself would have been distributed within the club's membership rather than sold commercially. The shikishiban format and the technical refinement of the carving and printing reflect the luxury status of surimono within the broader Edo print economy. The series was produced near the end of Shuntei's life — he died in 1820, the year this print is dated — and represents his contribution to the surimono tradition that ran alongside his better-known warrior prints throughout his career.