Hiroshi Yoshida

Japanese, 1876-1950

BiographyHiroshi Yoshida, born Hiroshi Ueda in Kurume City, Japan, took the name of his adoptive father, a public school painting teacher. At nineteen Yoshida began his fine art training; first with masters of western-style painting in Kyoto and Tokyo, and later furthered his studies in Europe and America. He won a cash prize for his first exhibition at the Detroit Museum of Art (now the Detroit Institute of Arts) in 1899, and exhibited his work at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904.

In 1920, at age forty-four, Yoshida abandoned his painting career for printmaking. At that time he began a collaborative working relationship with Watanabe Shōzaburō, the publisher credited with establishing the shin hanga (new prints) genre. In 1925, after the firm was destroyed in the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, Yoshida established his own print studio where he was often responsible for carving the blocks and printing the impressions himself. As part of his successful efforts to promote Japanese graphic art to a western audience, he became the sole shin hanga artists to sign and title his prints in English and to use a jizuri (“self-printed”) seal. He also co-organized with TMA curators J. Arthur MacLean and Dorothy L. Blair the Toledo Museum of Art’s 1930 large, travelling “Special Exhibition of Modern Japanese Prints”. Yoshida was a prolific artist, creating 259 prints during his lifetime, and traveled the world to sketch landscape and genre scenes.

Person TypeIndividual

Terms