Hiroshi Yoshida Sold at Auction Prices

Painter, Wood cutter, b. 1876 - d. 1950

(b Kurume, Japan, 1876; d 1950) Japanese Painter and Printmaker. Yoshida Hiroshi loved the outdoors and believed his travels [to be] an essential element of his art. Stylistically he is a romantic realist whose oil landscapes and woodblock prints are geographically site-specific as he recorded his impressions while in each location. Born in Kurume, Fukuoka Prefecture, Yoshida was adopted by his junior high school art teacher Yoshida Kasaburo. Yoshida's formal art training began in Kyoto under Tamura Soritsu. Yoshida [then] moved to Tokyo for further study and enrolled in the private art school, Fudosha, run by the innovative Western-style painter Koyama Shotaro. The first part of Yoshida's career was an active period in which he created watercolors and oil paintings that were shown in Bunten and Teiten exhibitions and in those of the artists' cultural group, the Taiheiyo Gakai (Pacific Ocean Painting Circle), that he co-founded in 1902 with his friend and colleague, Nakagawa Hachiro. The second period of Yoshida's career began in 1920 when he met the influential print publisher Watanabe Shozaburo. Shortly thereafter Yoshida focused his artistic energy on the woodblock print with Watanabe showing and selling his work at prices that exceeded those of Ito Shinsuiand and Kawase Hasui. (Credit: Christie’s, New York, Japanese Prints, Paintings and Works of Art, April 26, 1995, lot 407)