Hiroshi Yoshida

Hiroshi Yoshida (1876–1950) was a Japanese painter and woodblock print artist widely regarded, alongside Kawase Hasui, as one of the greatest artists of the shin-hanga movement. Distinguished by his fusion of Western oil painting techniques with traditional Japanese woodblock printmaking, Yoshida created approximately 260 print designs over his career, many depicting landscapes from his extensive travels across Asia, Europe, and North America.

Born Hiroshi Ueda on September 19, 1876, in Kurume, Fukuoka Prefecture on the island of Kyushu, he was the son of Ueda Tsukane, a schoolteacher from an old samurai family. At age fifteen, his exceptional painting talent was discovered by Kasaburo Yoshida, a junior high school art teacher who, together with his wife Rui, adopted the boy into the Yoshida family. Around 1893, at approximately seventeen, Yoshida traveled to Kyoto to study Western-style oil painting under Tamura Soryu and Miyake Kokki. After two years, he moved to Tokyo and entered the Fudosha, a private painting school run by the leading yoga painter Koyama Shotaro, where he studied for approximately three years. He also joined the Meiji Bijutsukai, the first Western-style art organization in Japan, and established himself as an accomplished oil painter before the age of twenty-five.

Yoshida's extraordinary career was defined by travel. In October 1899, he and fellow painter Nakagawa Hachiro departed for the United States, exhibiting at the Detroit Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The sales success financed onward travel to Europe, where Yoshida attended the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 and won a prize. He returned to Japan around 1901. In 1902, he co-founded the Taiheiyo Gakai (Pacific Painting Association), a successor to the Meiji Fine Arts Society. A second major trip to the United States and Europe followed from 1904 to 1907, during which he exhibited at the Rhode Island School of Design and the St. Louis World Exposition, and traveled extensively through Switzerland, Spain, North Africa, and Egypt. Upon his return to Japan in 1907, he married Fujio Yoshida, who was herself a distinguished artist.

Yoshida's transition to woodblock printmaking came around 1920, at the age of forty-four, when he produced his first prints at the Watanabe Print Workshop under the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo. The Great Kanto Earthquake of September 1, 1923, destroyed Watanabe's workshop along with Yoshida's original woodblocks. Following a trip to the United States and Europe from late 1923 through August 1925—partly to raise funds for earthquake victims—Yoshida was deeply impressed by the Western esteem for Japanese woodblock prints. This experience galvanized his commitment to the medium, and in 1925 he established his own independent workshop in Tokyo, employing professional carvers and printers under his direct supervision.

The period from 1925 to 1941 marked Yoshida's peak printmaking years. His 1926 output was especially remarkable, with forty-one or forty-two prints produced in a single year, including several of his most celebrated series. The Twelve Scenes in the Japan Alps, completed in 1926, is considered among his finest achievements, capturing the grandeur of the Japanese mountains he loved and climbed annually for over thirty years. The Seto Inland Sea series, also from 1926, includes the famous Sailing Boats set, in which six prints depict the same maritime scene at morning, forenoon, afternoon, evening, night, and in mist, demonstrating his innovative betsuzuri technique of reusing the same woodblocks with different color schemes to portray changing light conditions. The Ten Views of Mount Fuji, begun in 1926 and completed in 1928, further cemented his reputation as a master landscape artist.