Seven Lucky Gods, Year of the Dragon — Right Panel

Seven Lucky Gods, Year of the Dragon — Right Panel (七福神辰年図 右) is the right-hand sheet of a Kawanabe Kyōsui color woodblock [triptych](/glossary/triptych) depicting the Shichifukujin (Seven Gods of Fortune) in a year-of-the-dragon (tatsu-doshi) New Year configuration. The print is held by Ritsumeikan University's Art Research Center as part of its substantial digital archive of Japanese woodblock prints (accession Z0173-453(1)). The Shichifukujin — Daikokuten, Ebisu, Bishamonten, Benzaiten, Fukurokuju, Jurōjin, and Hotei — are a syncretic group of Buddhist, Shintō, Taoist, and Hindu deities who came together as a guarantor group of long life, prosperity, and good fortune in the Muromachi and Edo periods, and who are conventionally depicted at New Year aboard the takarabune (treasure ship). Kyōsui's triptych extends this iconography into a multi-panel zodiacal year-greeting format, with each panel showing two or three of the deities arranged across a continuous setting. The print belongs to the same kind of celebratory greeting-print production that drove the [surimono](/glossary/surimono) trade and the New Year ehon market of late Meiji Tokyo, and is a characteristic example of Kyōsui's [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) and figural training applied to the Edo-period emblematic repertoire of her father's lineage.