A Woman as Ebisu, 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 1954.719), this Katsukawa Shuntei shikishiban surimono belongs to the same Hanagasaren shichifukujin series as the Daikoku impression and depicts a female figure in the role of Ebisu, the god of fishermen and merchants and the patron of honest labor. In conventional Edo iconography Ebisu appears as a smiling, somewhat plump fisherman holding a fishing rod and a large red sea bream — the tai whose name puns on the auspicious term medetai (auspicious, joyful). The series-wide mitate concept replaces this male deity with a woman who assumes Ebisu's role, transforming the canonical New Year image into a witty, allusive surimono suitable for the literary tastes of the Hanagasa Poetry Club's membership. As with the rest of the Seven Lucky Gods, Ebisu had been a fixture of Edo New Year culture for centuries: prints of the Shichifukujin in their conventional male forms were one of the staple categories of cheap commercial woodblock printing, distributed annually as New Year's auspicious imagery. The surimono mitate transformation belongs to a different cultural register — sophisticated, allusive, and economically distinct, since these prints circulated within poetry-club networks rather than the commercial market. Shuntei's design reflects the high technical standards of late-Edo surimono production: refined linework, careful color registration, and the small intimate scale of the shikishiban format that distinguished surimono from the larger commercial single-sheet prints. The print is one of several impressions from this series held by the Art Institute of Chicago, allowing comparison of the full sequence as the Hanagasa membership would have received it.