Japanese wood block prints

Yoshida Hiroshi (1876-1950)

Japan

Hiroshi Yoshida was a 20th-century Japanese painter and woodblock printmaker. He is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the shin-hanga style, and is noted especially for his excellent landscape prints. Shin-hanga ( 新版画 , lit. "new prints", "new woodcut (block) prints") was an art movement in early 20th- century Japan, during the Taishō and Shōwa periods, that revitalized the traditional ukiyo-e art rooted in the Edo and Meiji periods (17th – 19th century). Hiroshi began his artistic training with his adoptive father in Kurume, Fukuoka prefecture . Around the age of twenty, he left Kurume to study with Soritsu Tamura in Kyoto, subsequently moving to Tokyo and the tutelage of Shotaro Koyama. Yoshida studied Western-style painting, winning many exhibition prizes, and making several trips to the United States, Europe and North Africa selling his watercolors and oil paintings. In 1902, he played a leading role in the organization of the Meiji Fine Arts Society into the Pacific Painting Association.

While highly successful as an oil painter and watercolor artist, Hiroshi Yoshida turned to woodblock printmaking upon learning of the Western world’s infatuation with ukiyo -e.

JOAN CORRIGAN