Six women seated around a bird cage

Six Women Seated Around a Bird Cage is a Katsushika Hokusai ukiyo-e print from about 1823, held in the Art Institute of Chicago. The composition gathers a group of women within a domestic interior, their attention turned toward a hanging bird cage that becomes the focal point of conversation, observation, and gentle leisure. Caged songbirds, especially the small uguisu or other prized warblers, were popular companions in Edo households and a recurring subject in literature, painting, and woodblock prints. Hokusai's design carefully differentiates each figure through pose, hairstyle, and the patterns of her kimono, transforming an ostensibly simple scene of leisure into a study of female sociability. The print exemplifies Hokusai's continued engagement with bijinga, the genre of beautiful-women prints, even as his career increasingly turned toward landscapes and historical narrative in the 1820s. The setting, lightly suggested through tatami, sliding screens, and minimal furnishings, opens onto an implied garden, situating the women within the layered architectural and social space of the urban Edo home. As an Edo ukiyo-e print, the design demonstrates Hokusai's calibration of group composition, his attention to costume patterning, and his ability to convey character through gesture. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this ukiyo-e print as part of its substantial Katsushika Hokusai holdings documenting bijinga and domestic genre subjects.