with the help of those in his workshop. The paintings are unsigned, and are the only known paintings Utamaro did not sign. The paintings were commissioned by the prominent merchant of Shimotsuke Province (roughly modern Tochigi Prefecture). The city of Tochigi prospered as a trading centre connected by waterways to Edo (modern Tokyo); the arts also thrived there, and Utamaro had connections with those in Tochigi's poetry circles. Ihē was the uncle of , who published poetry under the name , a poet who had his work published in anthologies that included poems by Utamaro. A find of seven Utamaro paintings in Tochigi in 1936 indicates a relationship with the city and has brought speculation that he travelled there. 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. The first record of the paintings' public display together was in 1879, when a member of the Zenno merchant family had them at the temple in the city of Tochigi 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. He bought some years later, and a Japanese collector later purchased it and brought it back to Japan in 1939. Its whereabouts became unknown after an exhibition in 1948, until its rediscovery in 2012. The other two were purchased by American art galleries. The three were not displayed together again until 2016, when they were brought together for display at the Wadsworth Atheneum. The paintings have a reputation as Utamaro's most ambitious works. According to the art historian Shūgō Asano, "The snow—moon—flowers paintings are extraordinary even amongst Utamaro's paintings." To the art historian Tadashi Kobayashi, the paintings' "compositional power and dynamic postures are magnificent". Description and analysis The paintings are on the themes of "moon" (), "flowers" (), and "snow" (); "Moon", "flowers", and "snow" was a popular traditional artistic theme in Japan. Utamaro depicts one of the three most representative officially-approved pleasure districts in each of the paintings: Yoshiwara, Shinagawa, and Fukagawa. There are no male figures in any of