Hotei seated on a sack playing a zither, from an untitled series of harimaze

Hotei seated on a sack playing a zither comes from an untitled series of harimaze sheets by Katsushika Taito II, dated to the 1830s and held by the Art Institute of Chicago. Hotei, the Buddhist priest associated with happiness and one of the Seven Lucky Gods (Shichifukujin), was a perennial subject in Japanese popular imagery, recognizable by his bald head, large belly, and the cloth sack of treasures he carried. Taito II shows him seated cross-legged on the sack and playing a koto or similar stringed instrument, combining the deity's familiar attributes with a playful invention—Hotei rarely appears as a musician, and the depiction reflects the kind of inventive variation that nineteenth-century print designers brought to canonical religious figures. As a section of a harimaze sheet, the image would have been printed alongside several other small scenes intended to be cut apart or kept together as a single album leaf. The Hokusai-school drawing shows Taito II's careful contour line and his characteristic compression of figure into a strong silhouette.