The search for immortality is one of the major Daoist concepts, and religious Daoism has developed a cult of immortals. Consequently, the Daoist immortals have been extremely popular motifs in Chinese painting.*br* However, paintings of Daoist immortals have not been treated as an important topic in Chinese art history. As a first step toward a general understanding of the iconography of Daoist immortals, this article discusses one immortal, Liu Haichan, as a case study.*br* Liu Haichan was a court official in the 10th century and later became a Daoist. He has been worshipped as the fourth patriarch of the Quanzhen school, one of the largest schools of religious Daoism since the 13th century. From the middle of the Ming dynasty, he has been extraordinarily popular and has gradually been transformed into a folk symbol of good fortune. In art, Liu Haichan is usually represented carrying a three-legged toad and appears as a young Daoist wanderer.*br* Since the cult of Liu Haichan spread widely for a long time, pictorial representations of him do not exhibit a consistent iconography. Discrepancies also exist between Liu Haichan's visual images and literary descriptions. In fact, the most distinctive iconographic motif, an auspicious three-legged toad, is totally missing in the pre-Qing texts. Therefore, the original identity of this immortal can be controversial.*br* Some scholars have hesitated to identify him as Liu Haichan and named him tentatively the "Toad Immortal." Recently scholars have suggested new identifications. For example, Arming Jing renamed the "Toad Immortal" as Helan Qizhen (?-1010), a Daoist master in the Five Dynasties and the early Song periods. Houmei Song suggests another candidate, Ge Xuan (164-244) of the later Han Dynasty. However, this new identification is still dubious, and those candidates do not sufficiently qualify.*br* Since the "Toad Immortal" has been identified as Liu Haichan after the mid-Ming period, he is still a highly probable figure for the original "Toad Immortal." Most of later knowledge of Liu Haichan strongly relies on Yuan-period Daoist hagiographies. As in the cases of other Daoist immortals. many legendary stories are included in Liu Haichan's hagiography, and it has been fabricated through later periods.*br* In the Song dynasty, records of Liu Haichan are found not only in Daoist literature but also in biji or note-form literature. To reconstruct Liu Haichan's image, the information in biji draws our special attention because it clearly describes Liu Haichan as an eccentric wanderer and becomes a significant clue to identifying the "Toad Immoral In Song biji records, Liu Haichan appears as a strange and mysterious figure but displays supernatural abilities. Biji literature and many other vernacular stories of him may have been transmitted and become the main sources of the Yuan hagiographies.*br* Since the typical iconography of the "Toad Immortal" is similar to Liu Haichan's image in several biji records of the Song Dynasty, Liu Haichan could have been the prototype for the "Toad Immortal." Considering Liu Haichan's popularity during the Song dynasty, we can assume that his icon originated in the Song Dynasty. However, there are no extant examples of Liu Haichan's image from the Song Dynasty, and the earliest extant image of Liu Haichan is dated to the Yuan dynasty. His image was a popular subject-matter from the Ming dynasty onward.*br* Relying on popular belief and literature, this article examines the formation of Liu Haichan's iconography. And this study helps us to understand the radical transformation of his iconography in later period and other similar cases of popular immortals and deities.