Hour of the Sheep [2 pm] (hitsuji no koku), from the series “Sundial of Young Women" ("Musume hi-dokei")

Kitagawa Utamaro's Hour of the Sheep (2 p.m.) (hitsuji no koku), from the series Sundial of Young Women (Musume hi-dokei), is held by the Art Institute of Chicago (artwork 88576). The series Musume hi-dokei is a parallel project to Utamaro's better-known Twelve Hours in Yoshiwara, applying the same hour-by-hour structure to the daily life of musume, young townswomen, rather than to courtesans of the licensed quarter. By translating the twelve traditional Japanese double-hours into a sequence of bijin sheets, Utamaro builds an alternative ethnography of Edo femininity: where the Yoshiwara series describes the rhythm of the great houses, the Sundial of Young Women describes the rhythm of merchant and artisan households, of teahouse work, and of the city's broader female labor. The Hour of the Sheep falls in early afternoon, roughly 1 to 3 p.m., the warm middle of the day, when activities like sewing, washing, child care, errand-running, or leisure conversation typically occupied young women. Utamaro's design assigns one such activity to the chosen beauty, identifying her time by inscribed label and by visual cue. Stylistically the print is in Utamaro's mature Edo bijin-ga manner, with careful drawing of face, hair, and kimono and a relatively quiet ground that throws the figure forward. The Art Institute of Chicago's holding is a useful comparative example to the Yoshiwara Twelve Hours series, allowing researchers to see how Utamaro structured complementary projects for different female publics. For collectors of ukiyo-e, the Musume hi-dokei is a less famous but equally rewarding Utamaro series, demonstrating his interest in depicting women outside the pleasure quarter as well as within it.