, Yoshiwara no Hana , and are three hanging-scroll paintings corresponding to the themes of "moon", "flowers", and "snow", respectively. These were produced in the late 18th century by the Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro () for the prominent merchant Zenno Ihē. The paintings have a reputation as Utamaro's most ambitious works. They are unusually large, and were executed in high-quality coloured pigments on imported Chinese Xuan paper. Utamaro made the paintings from about 1788 to about 1801–1804; it is not known why they took so long to complete. In the 1880s, they came into European collections and were soon split up; two are now in American collections, and the other is back in Japan. After their first known public display together in 1879, they were not exhibited together again until 2016. Background 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. 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 () made his name in the 1790s with his ("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 sharp contrast to the stereotyped, idealized images that had been the norm. Utamaro is less known for his paintings () than for the large number of woodblock prints he produced, of which about 2,000 are known. 53 of his paintings are known, many of which have been discovered only in the 21st century. Utamaro's paintings have received relatively little critical attention. Execution and history The earliest of the paintings was made and the last . They are dated based on comparison to the styles Utamaro used in his other works. It is unknown why the paintings took so long to execute, or whether Utamaro executed them alone or