Hari-shigoto (, "Needlework", ) is a colour triptych print by the Japanese ukiyo-e artist Kitagawa Utamaro ( – 1806). It depicts women working with cloth at home with children playing around them. Critics hold the prints in high regard, in particular the skill required to reproduce the translucent effect of the cloth with woodblock prints. Background Ukiyo-e art flourished in Japan during the Edo period from the 17th to 19th centuries, and took as its primary subjects courtesans, kabuki actors, and others associated with the "floating world" lifestyle of the pleasure districts. Alongside paintings, mass-produced woodblock prints were a major form of the genre. In the mid-18th century full-colour prints became common, printed using a large number of woodblocks, one for each colour. A prominent genre was ("pictures of beauties"), which depicted most often courtesans and geisha at leisure, and promoted the entertainments of the pleasure districts. Kitagawa Utamaro (–1806) made his name in the 1790s with his bijin ōkubi-e ("large-headed pictures of beautiful women") portraits, focusing on the head and upper torso, a style others had previously employed in portraits of kabuki actors. Utamaro experimented with line, colour, and printing techniques to bring out subtle differences in the features, expressions, and backdrops of subjects from a wide variety of class and background. Utamaro's individuated beauties were in contrast to the stereotyped, idealized images that had been the norm. He set many prints in scenes of daily life and depicted a wider variety of women in a greater range of situations than was usual in ukiyo-e, often including scenes of mothers with their children. Publication The set of three multicolour nishiki-e prints forms a triptych and was published in by . Each sheet is ōban size, measuring about and bears Uemura's mark () and the seal Utamaru hitsu (, "the brush of Utamaro"). About the same time, Uemura published an untitled ōban-sized five-print series by Utamaro with the same yellowish backgrounds depicting woman in domestic situations. Like the Hari-shigoto triptych, the woman appear full-length and subtly bare their legs in semierotic postures. It is assumed the series is somehow related to Harishigoto. Description Set against a blank, yellowish background, the picture displays a scene of women doing with children playing around them, one in each print. Utamaro is known for the eroticism of his work which he displays subtly even in this middle-class domestic scene via exposed legs and breasts