page_title: Shinagawa no Tsuki, Yoshiwara no Hana, and Fukagawa no Yuki
section_title: Fukagawa no Yuki
hierarchical_section_title: Shinagawa no Tsuki, Yoshiwara no Hana, and Fukagawa no Yuki / Description and analysis / Fukagawa no Yuki
caption_attribution_description: English: Detail of the ukiyo-e painting Fukagawa no Yuki
context_page_description: Beginning in the late 18th the Japanese ukiyo-e artist Kitagawa Utamaro produced three hanging-scroll paintings for the prominent merchant Zenno Ihē. The themes of the paintings are "moon", "flowers", and "snow", and are named Shinagawa no Tsuki, Yoshiwara no Hana, and Fukagawa no Yuki
  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.
context_section_description: Fukagawa no Yuki (深川の雪, "Snow in Fukagawa") depicts a temporary brothel in Fukagawa with the theme snow.  The horizontal painting is a hanging scroll in coloured pigments on eight joined sheets of Xuan paper, together measuring 198.8 by 341.1 centimetres (78.3 in × 134.3 in).  The painting resides in the collection of the Okada Museum of Art in the town of Hakone in Japan.
  Utamaro achieves a strong compositional balance despite the painting's complexity.  He distributes 27 figures throughout it amongst several buildings, such as a teahouse duplexes and a second-storey restaurant-teahouse at the left.  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.  Several of the figures pose in a manner similar to those in the book Seirō Ehon Nenjū Gyōji (1804) that Utamaro illustrated around the time he completed this painting, such as the woman looking behind her in the hallway in the centre, the woman with her arm wrapped around a pillar in the centre, and the woman crouched down near her with her hand on the railing, looking to the right behind her.
  Several women lean over the rails to check the snow.  A woman in the bottom left stops and looks down behind her at a cat tugging at her kimono; the kimono bears the Zenno family's kumaizasa crest on the shoulder.  In the middle a woman carries a tray of food along the hallway.  A group of guests sits around a hibachi heating device in a room at the right.  In the upper right a woman carries a large furoshiki bundle full of the courtesans' and geishas' bedclothes.  Several women in a back room sit playing hand games.  The women's kimonos tend to be of subdued colours such as indigo or brown, in contrast with the bright, flashy colours of the other two paintings.
  It is believed Utamaro made the painting in c. 1801–1804.  The ukiyo-e collector Takeo Nagase purchased Fukagawa no Yuki in Paris from an ukiyo-e art dealer from Japan and brought it back to Japan in 1939.  It was displayed in an exhibition at the Matsuzakaya department store in the Ginza district of Tokyo in 1948.  Thereafter the painting's whereabouts became unknown, and researchers made do with only black-and-white photography.  The art dealer Seiichirō Teramoto rediscovered it in January 2012, and had its authenticity confirmed by Shūgō Asano.  It was purchased by the Okada Museum of Art, which has declined to name who had it or where it was found.  It has since had touch-up work done by a Chinese restorer.
caption: The Zenno family crest appears on the shoulder of this woman's kimono in Fukagawa no Yuki.
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