Seishi

Date:: 1940
Medium:: Woodblock print
Format:: Oban
Publisher:: Yoshida Studio
Source:: Japanese Art Open Database

Typical Price

From Yoshida's later career (1935–1950), these prints show his technical mastery at full maturity. Later-decade prints slightly trail peak-period 1920s works at auction, but jizuri impressions of desirable subjects still command strong prices. Standard jizuri Japanese landscapes follow the dealer benchmark of approximately $2,149; Sacred Bridge, Nikko (1937) sold for $800 at Schmidt's Antiques for a pencil-signed example.

Jizuri (artist-supervised) seal: $1,200–$3,500
Studio edition (no jizuri): $600–$1,800
Posthumous/family workshop reprint: $250–$700

Description

Seishi — a Japanese word suggesting "quietude" or "stillness" — captures the meditative quality Yoshida sought in his 1940 landscape subjects. By this point in his career, Yoshida had traveled extensively across Asia, Europe, and North America, and his later domestic subjects carry the perspective of an artist who had measured Japan's landscapes against the world's. The print's title suggests a deliberate compositional choice — a scene selected for its silence, its quality of suspended time, rendered through the layered control of his jizuri printing technique.