The Immortal Lü Dongbin

The Immortal Lü Dongbin is a hanging-scroll painting by Tomioka Tessai depicting one of the Eight Daoist Immortals — Lü Dongbin, the patron of barbers and scholars and one of the most popular figures in the Daoist pantheon — executed in ink and color on silk. The figure is shown in characteristic iconography (long-robed, sword on the back, fly-whisk in hand) and rendered with the energetic, slightly caricatured line work of Tessai's late figural style. The picture carries a long inscription in classical Chinese identifying the figure and quoting from the corpus of Daoist verse traditionally attributed to him. Tessai produced numerous treatments of the Daoist immortals over his career — singly, in pairs (such as the Three Stars of happiness, prosperity, and longevity), or as a complete group of eight — drawing on the inexhaustible iconographic literature surrounding the immortals in Chinese Daoist tradition and on the visual conventions developed by Song and Yuan painters, refined by the seventeenth-century Chinese individualists, and inherited by the Japanese bunjin painters of the Edo period. Lü Dongbin in particular was a favored subject for Tessai because of the figure's combined Daoist and literary associations.