Going to Bed from the series Ten Types of Beauties in Pictures (Jittai e-fuzoku)

Going to Bed, from the series Ten Types of Beauties in Pictures (Jittai e-fuzoku), recorded on ukiyo-e.org from the Art Institute of Chicago holdings, is a Torii Kiyonaga design that joins a typological catalogue of female roles, each illustrated by a characteristic moment in daily life. The Going to Bed leaf shows a woman at the threshold of sleep, her sash loosened, her hair beginning to fall, a folding screen or hanging robe in the background marking the transition from public dress to nocturnal informality. Kiyonaga's interest in the unobserved moment, when the formality of the Edo townswoman is allowed to lapse, gives the print an intimacy unusual in earlier bijin-ga. The series Jittai e-fuzoku belongs to a broader fashion in the late 1780s and early 1790s for typologies—ten beauties, twelve hours, twenty-four examples—through which publishers and artists organised the human inventory of Edo into manageable sets. As an heir to the Torii school, Kiyonaga brought his trademark slow, monumental figures into the print's compact format, treating undressing as a sculptural problem of weight and balance rather than as voyeuristic incident. The image is preserved through the Art Institute of Chicago's records aggregated on ukiyo-e.org. For collectors, the design exemplifies the way Kiyonaga's Edo bijin-ga seized on the small rituals of dressing, washing and sleeping as legitimate subjects, paving the way for Utamaro's later psychological studies of women caught at similar private thresholds.