Abuto
About This Series
Abuto is the database designation for a Yoshida Hiroshi print depicting the small port town of Abuto on the Inland Sea coast of Hiroshima Prefecture, a fishing community at the tip of the Numakuma Peninsula whose distinctive Kannondo, a Buddhist hall dedicated to Kannon and dating from the early seventeenth century, projects into the sea on a rocky promontory and serves as a long-established landmark for vessels navigating the eastern Inland Sea. The Abuto subject belongs to the body of Inland Sea coastal views that Yoshida developed across the 1920s and 1930s, a strand of his output that addressed the calm enclosed waters of the Seto Naikai with the same observed naturalistic eye that he brought to his mountain landscapes and foreign travel cycles, and that drew on his extensive personal travel through the maritime provinces of western Japan. Working from his independent jizuri workshop, established in 1925 after his break with Watanabe Shozaburo, Yoshida treated the Inland Sea subjects with the layered atmospheric refinement that the jizuri production method made possible, in which he personally supervised every stage of block cutting and printing and in which the bokashi gradations of sea and sky could be calibrated to particular conditions of light and weather. The Abuto print accordingly belongs to a project in which the Inland Sea served Yoshida as the Japanese counterpart to the foreign coastal subjects of his American, European, and Indian travel series, with the Kannondo hall and the surrounding water providing the kind of compact compositional subject that his time-of-day color-variant experiments could handle to particularly atmospheric effect. The Inland Sea coastal views stand alongside Yoshida's mountain cycles as the principal Japanese subjects of his independent production, and modern scholarship treats the Abuto print and its related Seto Naikai subjects as evidence of the artist's sustained engagement with the maritime topographical tradition that he had inherited from Hiroshige and other Edo predecessors. Representative impressions are held by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Toledo Museum of Art, and other major Western collections of twentieth-century Japanese print, where early jizuri printings preserve the registration and pigment fidelity that distinguish first impressions from later workshop restrikes.
Prints in This Series (1)
Frequently Asked Questions
Abuto is the database designation for a Yoshida Hiroshi print depicting the small port town of Abuto on the Inland Sea coast of Hiroshima Prefecture, a fishing community at the tip of the Numakuma Peninsula whose distinctive Kannondo, a Buddhist hall dedicated to Kannon and dating from the early seventeenth century, projects into the sea on a rocky promontory and serves as a long-established landmark for vessels navigating the eastern Inland Sea. The Abuto subject belongs to the body of Inland Sea coastal views that Yoshida developed across the 1920s and 1930s, a strand of his output that addressed the calm enclosed waters of the Seto Naikai with the same observed naturalistic eye that he brought to his mountain landscapes and foreign travel cycles, and that drew on his extensive personal travel through the maritime provinces of western Japan. Working from his independent jizuri workshop, established in 1925 after his break with Watanabe Shozaburo, Yoshida treated the Inland Sea subjects with the layered atmospheric refinement that the jizuri production method made possible, in which he personally supervised every stage of block cutting and printing and in which the bokashi gradations of sea and sky could be calibrated to particular conditions of light and weather. The Abuto print accordingly belongs to a project in which the Inland Sea served Yoshida as the Japanese counterpart to the foreign coastal subjects of his American, European, and Indian travel series, with the Kannondo hall and the surrounding water providing the kind of compact compositional subject that his time-of-day color-variant experiments could handle to particularly atmospheric effect. The Inland Sea coastal views stand alongside Yoshida's mountain cycles as the principal Japanese subjects of his independent production, and modern scholarship treats the Abuto print and its related Seto Naikai subjects as evidence of the artist's sustained engagement with the maritime topographical tradition that he had inherited from Hiroshige and other Edo predecessors. Representative impressions are held by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Toledo Museum of Art, and other major Western collections of twentieth-century Japanese print, where early jizuri printings preserve the registration and pigment fidelity that distinguish first impressions from later workshop restrikes.
The Abuto series contains 1 prints, created by Hiroshi Yoshida.
The Abuto series was created by Hiroshi Yoshida (吉田博).
We currently have 1 of 1 known prints from the Abuto series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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