Horse, from the series "Twelve Hours of the Floating World (Ukiyo juni shi)"

From the series Twelve Hours of the Floating World (Ukiyo juni shi), this oban color woodblock print at the Art Institute of Chicago belongs to a calendar series in which each of the twelve traditional zodiac hours is matched with a moment of female life in Edo's pleasure quarters. The Hour of the Horse (Uma no koku) corresponds to roughly 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. in modern reckoning, the midday hours when the rhythms of the Yoshiwara district were resuming after the post-dawn lull. Calendar series of this kind, organizing female figure observation around the twelve-hour or twelve-month cycle, were a Tenmei-era specialty that suited the bijin-ga genre's interest in seasonal and temporal nuance. The full oban format, larger than the chuban of many of his series, allowed Shuncho to develop each subject as a major figure composition rather than a compressed vignette, and is one reason the Twelve Hours prints are among his most ambitious independent works.