<b>ISHIYAMA TEMPLE</b> / Toshi Yoshida1946$1,200</em>

Details

Toshi Yoshida was the oldest son of Hiroshi and Fujio Yoshida. In early childhood, one of Yoshida’s legs was paralyzed. Unable to attend school, the young Yoshida enjoyed watching and sketching animals and being in his father’s print shop. As Yoshida grew older, he showed interest in making prints and started carving and printing in the family studio under his father’s tutelage. Yoshida carved and printed his father’s designs.

Yoshida’s first original designs date to the mid-1920s, and his career started in earnest in the late 1930s with a series of chuban-size landscapes that advanced his father’s style but demonstrated a sensitivity and flair for color that was all his own. In the 1950s, after his father’s death, the young Yoshida experimented with various styles and began working in abstraction concurrently producing highly representational designs. Like his father, Toshi Yoshida traveled the world in search of inspiration and produced a large body of work featuring foreign subjects. Yoshida’s diverse abilities and spirit of experimentation set him apart from his father, advancing his own style and artistic perspective and bolstering the Yoshida family legacy.

This charming scene showcases the interior of a temple. Paper lanterns are strung overhead, and the normally dim temple interior is illuminated by the raging light of day as it trails through the various openings of the structure. It is interesting to note that this is the first design Yoshida produced after the war. The design is reflective but is not somber. The print seems to invite the viewer to mill around the hall, joining the visitors as they take in the scene.

The masterful use of light and sense of color anticipates his later masterpieces. Of particular note is the artist’s treatment of the figures. Their facial expressions are well articulated as well as their clothing—hinting at their personality. Unlike his father’s work, which most often utilized people as part of the landscape’s composition rather than the central subject, Yoshida’s treatments of the landscape and the various distinct figures that populate it are on equal footing. The design is not a quaint nostalgic Shin Hanga work but a design that advances a specific time and place. Ishiyama Temple is one of Toshi Yoshida’s earliest works and among his first oban-size designs. At first blush, the work appears reminiscent of his father’s work but a closer examination yields the young artist’s own voice.

Connoisseur's Note

This work is a rare lifetime impression produced by the artist himself, not a later posthumous impression. Lifetime impressions bear a live pencil signature at the bottom right margin, in contrast to the later one with stamp signatures closely resembling pencilwork. Later impressions also showcase the name and information of the current publisher on the reverse, which this print lacks. This impression was never framed or displayed for extended periods, ensuring the colors are in a pristine state of preservation, appearing as vivid today as they were the day the work was produced.