Tone River

Date:: 1926
Medium:: Color woodblock print
Format:: Oban
Publisher:: Yoshida Studio
Source:: Art Institute of Chicago

Typical Price

This 1920s print from the heart of Yoshida's jizuri period represents his mature shin-hanga technique. Standard jizuri prints of Japanese landscapes cluster around $2,149 (1stDibs dealer benchmark). The jizuri seal — indicating Yoshida personally supervised printing — is the single most important value driver, typically doubling the price over non-jizuri lifetime impressions.

Jizuri (artist-supervised) seal: $1,500–$4,000
Studio edition (no jizuri): $800–$2,000
Posthumous/family workshop reprint: $300–$800

Description

The Tone River — Japan's second-longest river and once the primary commercial artery of the Kanto plain — is captured here in its broad, calm middle reaches in 1926. Yoshida depicts a wide-skied river scene with the horizontal expansiveness of a landscape painter trained in the Western tradition, the flat river delta evoking both the Dutch masters and the broad-view Japanese tradition of river landscape prints. Subtle atmospheric gradations in the sky demonstrate his technical mastery of graduated color printing.