Shinagawa no Tsuki, Yoshiwara no Hana, and Fukagawa no Yuki

These were produced in the late 18th century by the Japanese ukiyo-e artist Kitagawa Utamaro (c. 1753 – 1806) for the prominent merchant Zenno Ihē.

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, geisha and others associated with the "floating world" lifestyle of the pleasure districts.

[2] A prominent genre was bijin-ga ("pictures of beauties"), which depicted most often courtesans and geisha at leisure, and promoted the entertainments of the pleasure districts.

[4] 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.

[12] The paintings were commissioned by the prominent merchant Zenno Ihē (善野 伊兵衛)[7] of Shimotsuke Province (roughly modern Tochigi Prefecture).

[14] He is said to have visited Tochigi at least three times, though evidence of this has not been found, and the shop the Zenno family owned had an Edo branch where Utamaro could have had contact with Ihē.

[15] The first record[b] of the paintings' public display together was in 1879, when a member of the Zenno merchant family had them at the temple Jōgan-ji (定願寺) in the city of Tochigi[16] on 23 November 1879.

It is not known what happened to the paintings after this, but at the height of the popularity of Japonism in the Western world, Yoshiwara no Hana and Fukagawa no Yuki somehow came into the possession of the Parisian art dealer Siegfried Bing, who photographed them in 1887.

[9] Utamaro depicts one of the three most representative officially-approved yūkaku pleasure districts in each of the paintings: Yoshiwara, Shinagawa, and Fukagawa.

Edo-period Japan had not developed the skill to make it, and as the Japanese government maintained a policy of isolation with severely restricted foreign trade, Zenno may have obtained the paper for Utamaro in secret.

It resides in the collection of the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.[8] The scene takes place at an evening party under a full moon in a two-story yūkaku pleasure house[8] called the Sagamiya (相模屋), also called the Dozō Sagami (土蔵相模)[13] in Shinagawa, near the administrative capital of Edo.

[10] Utamaro uses an elevated point of view traditional to Japanese art while employing European-style geometric perspective principles to give the architecture a sense of depth.

[22] Utamaro was yet to develop a distinct style of his own at this point, and the influence of Torii Kiyonaga on his depiction of the figures is strong.

[24] A framed kyōka poem by Yomo no Akara (poetic pen name of Ōta Nanpo) hanging from the ceiling in the upper right reads:[23] Kamaya Ihē commissioned the paintings in the late 18th century.

The horizontal painting is a hanging scroll[19] of eight joined sheets of Xuan paper,[7] together measuring 186.7 by 256.9 centimetres (73.5 in × 101.1 in), and executed in ink in c. 1791–92.

They are spectators to a dance performance—what appears to be a zashiki kyōgen, a style of kabuki theatre adapted to performance in private samurai homes.

[13] The horizontal painting is a hanging scroll in coloured pigments[20] on eight joined sheets of Xuan paper,[7] together measuring 198.8 by 341.1 centimetres (78.3 in × 134.3 in).

[20] The main building appears to be a two-story restaurant-teahouse; the picture focuses on an atrium with a garden court in the middle surrounded by railings, revealing the snowy outdoors.

With the exception of the young boy who reaches out at a cat in the lower left, all the figures are women, though in real life the guests of a pleasure house would be men.