1928 (Showa 3)／Color woodblock print on paper
24.5 x 37.8 cm
SUMMARY
In 1928, at the age of 52, Yoshida Hiroshi produced a series of six block prints under the title “Southern Japan Alps”. Along with this series, in that year he produced the final seven pieces of the series Ten Views of Mount Fuji, five for Tokyo Juni Dai (“Twelve Scenes of Tokyo”), his first ten small-scale wood block printings with the themes of the Seto Inland Sea, landscapes of Europe and Mount Fuji, and seven Japanese landscape block prints – 35 pieces all told. According to Hiroshi, “By now, mountains and art have become inseparable in my life. Art is my profession, but as a theme there is nothing that attracts me more than various landscapes of mountains. The more I delve into them, the deeper and more beautiful these landscapes of mountains get.” (Yoshida Hiroshi, On the Beauty of Mountains, in Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha, 1931). And in fact he camped in the mountains for days, even weeks, to melt into union with them, in order to grasp a moment of ever-changing beauty – to create mountainous landscapes that move people. In this piece the beautiful view from the top of the Komagatake Mountain is expressed brilliantly in woodblock printing. The outline of the cloud cover is very effective, expressing the lively movement of an ever-changing sea of clouds.
ARTIST
Yoshida Hiroshi
1876-1950
Born in Fukuoka. Yoshida Hiroshi first studied under Tamura Soritsu in Kyoto, and later went to Tokyo to join the Fudo-sha group of Koyama Shotaro. He went on to become a member of the Meiji Art Society. In 1902 he set up the Taihei Yoga Kai. He received the first prize at the inaugural Bun-ten, and that work was purchased by the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture. From then on he continued submitting to public exhibitions, and eventually went on to judge them. In 1920 he published his first woodblock print. He traveled Japan and regions of Europe and Asia to sketch, and many of these sketches were used for his print work. In his later years he founded the Japan Mountain Painting Association. He frequently painted mountainous landscapes from inside and outside of Japan.
List of artworks by the same artist
INFORMATION
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