Hiroshi Yoshida (吉田 博, Yoshida Hiroshi; September 19, 1876 – April 5, 1950) was a 20th-century Japanese painter and woodblock printmaker. Along with Hasui Kawase, he is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the shin-hanga style, and is noted especially for his landscape prints. Yoshida made numerous trips around the world, with the aim of getting to know different artistic expressions and making works of different landscapes. He traveled widely, and was particularly known for his images of non-Japanese subjects done in traditional Japanese woodblock style, including the Taj Mahal, the Swiss Alps, the Grand Canyon, and other National Parks in the United States.
He was known as a mountain painter (山岳画家) in Japan and spent about half of the year on sketching travels. He was particularly fond of mountain landscapes and painted many of them, founding the Nihon Sangakugaka Kyōkai (Japan Mountain Painting Society, 日本山岳画家協会) in his later years. As a mountaineer, he climbed the mountains of the Japanese Alps every summer and created his large paintings and woodblock prints after returning home.
Hiroshi Yoshida (born Hiroshi Ueda) was born in the city of Kurume, Fukuoka, in Kyushu, on September 19, 1876. His father, Ueda Tsukane, taught painting in public schools and came from a samurai family; Hiroshi showed an early gift for art that his father encouraged. At the age of 15, he was adopted by the Yoshida family after his talent for painting was discovered by Kasaburo Yoshida, a junior high school art teacher, and studied with the Kyoto yōga-ka (Western-style painters) Tamura Sōryū and Miyake Kokki. He moved to Tokyo at the age of 17 and entered the Fudōsha (不同舎), a painting school sponsored by the yōga-ka Koyama Shōtarō, and became a member of the Meiji Bijutsukai (Meiji Art Society, 明治美術会), the first Western-style art organization in Japan.
In 1899, Yoshida had his first American exhibition at the Detroit Museum of Art (now the Detroit Institute of Art). In 1900 he had an exhibition with Hachiro Nakagawa at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He then traveled to Washington, D.C., Providence, France, Great Britain, Germany, and Italy. He exhibited his work at the Paris Exposition of 1900, for which he received a commendation, and after coming to the United States in 1903, he exhibited his work at the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904, for which he received a bronze medal. Around this time, Yoshida and his fellow painters founded the Taiheiyōgakai (Pacific Art Society, 太平洋画会) the successor to the Meiji Bijutsukai.
Between 1903 and 1907 Yoshida travelled again to the United States, Europe and North Africa together with his stepsister and fellow painter Fujio, whom he married on their return to Japan. Until 1920 he built a successful career as an oil and watercolor painter working in the light, airy style he had absorbed in the West, though his independent temperament repeatedly put him at odds with Japan's official art establishment.
In 1920, at the age of 44, Yoshida presented his first woodcut at the Watanabe Print Workshop, organized by Shōzaburō Watanabe (1885–1962), publisher and advocate of the shin-hanga movement. His first work was a print depicting the Meiji Shrine. In 1921, he produced seven prints, including a series of sailing ships. However, Yoshida's collaboration with Watanabe was short partly due to Watanabe's shop burning down because of the Great Kanto earthquake on September 1, 1923.
Following the example of Goyō Hashiguchi, Yoshida subsequently decided to become independent, founding his own studio in 1925 and personally selecting the artisans whose work he would closely supervise. Despite the interruption of their collaboration, in 1924 Watanabe, aware that Yoshida was travelling to the United States to sell his work, asked him to include some of his own shin-hanga prints in his catalogue; these new prints proved so successful overseas that the publisher decided to concentrate his efforts abroad.
Despite the break, in 1924 Watanabe asked Yoshida, who was about to travel to the United States to sell his own work, to include some of Watanabe's shin-hanga prints in his catalogue there; the prints sold so well abroad that Watanabe subsequently focused his efforts on the American market. Yoshida later organized, together with the museum directors J. Arthur MacLean and his former student Dorothy Lillian Blair, two exhibitions of shin-hanga at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, in 1930 and 1936, the first major exhibitions abroad devoted exclusively to the new prints, and a turning point in their commercial success, since visitors on the touring show could order prints through Yoshida, who would in turn contact Watanabe.
In 1923, Yoshida made a third travel to the U.S. to sell the few works left after the earthquake. His prints were well received in the U.S. and he held exhibitions all over the country from his base in Boston. His travel to the United States made him aware of the high reputation of Japanese woodblock prints and he set out to create new woodblock prints that would combine the traditional Japanese technique of ukiyo-e with the realistic expression of yōga (Western-style painting).
In 1925, he hired a group of professional carvers and printers, and established his own studio. Prints were made under his close supervision. The first seventeen prints issued by his new studio all depicted non-Japanese subjects, and throughout his career Yoshida continued to produce both Japanese and foreign scenes in a picturesque and highly popular style. Yoshida combined the ukiyo-e collaborative system with the sōsaku-hanga principle of "artist's prints", and formed a third school, separating himself from the shin-hanga and sōsaku-hanga movement.
In 1925, he started the series Europe and the series The United States and published works like The Grand Canyon. In 1926, he published 41 prints, the year in which he produced the most prints in his life. In that year, he started the series Seto Inland Sea, of which Glittering Sea was published in the same year. He also published the series Twelve Scenes in the Japan Alps and three prints from the series Ten Views of Mount Fuji in the same year. In 1928, he published the series Southern Japan Alps and the remaining seven works from the series Ten Views of Mount Fuji.
From November 1930 to February 1931, Yoshida and his eldest son, Tōshi, went on a sketching trip to India and Southeast Asia. It was his fourth travel abroad. He became so absorbed in sketching that after a full day of painting at one destination, he would take an overnight train to the next destination and sleep in the sleeping car. He chose a season when he could see the sunrise at Kanchenjunga under clear skies, and he checked the phases of the moon so that he could sketch the Taj Mahal on a full moon night. As a result of this sketching travel, he produced 32 prints in the India and Southeast Asia series. These included depictions of Indian landscapes, such as his 1931 woodblock print Ghat in Benaras (Benaresu no gatto).
In 1938 Yoshida made the first of three trips to China as an official war artist.
At the age of 73, Yoshida took his last sketching trip to Izu and Nagaoka and painted his last works The Sea of Western Izu and The Mountains of Izu. He became sick on the trip and returned to Tokyo where he died on April 5, 1950, at his home. From 1930 until his death in 1950 he produced about 250 woodblock prints. His tomb is in the grounds of the Ryuun-in, in Koishikawa, Tokyo.
Throughout his life, Yoshida was a leading figure in the Japanese art world of his time in the fields of woodblock prints, watercolors and oil paintings.
During a visit to the United States in 1923, he became aware of the high esteem in which Japanese woodblock prints were held and set out to create a new style of woodblock prints that combined the traditional Japanese technique of ukiyo-e with the realistic expression of yōga (Western-style painting). He borrowed the brush strokes of oil painting and the color expression of watercolor from yōga techniques and integrated them with traditional ukiyo-e techniques.