<b>WETTERHORN</b> / Hiroshi Yoshida1925<b>SOLD</b></em>

Details

Hiroshi Yoshida started his career as an oil and watercolor painter. He traveled to Europe at the onset of his printmaking career to sightsee and to work. An avid outdoorsman and hiker, Yoshida took full advantage of his travels and painted the important natural treasures he visited—all executed in the field, utilizing the plein air painting technique. Yoshida’s nine European series woodblock prints were all conceived on one of his early travels to the Continent and are based on oil or watercolor paintings he produced onsite, which accounts for the strong realism in the designs, a quality rarely encountered in Japanese prints.

Rising majestically from the quaint countryside village, the mountain ascends from a light mist and into the artist’s imagination. Being an avid mountaineer, Yoshida captures this stunning European peak with the vision of an enthusiast hiker. The landscape is rendered in soft and vivid splashes of color, mimicking the spontaneous feeling of oil painting produced out in the field and bringing to mind the countryside paintings of van Gogh. The mountain itself is showcased in stunning realism only Yoshida, an experienced mountaineer, could cite. The contrast between the impressionistic landscape and the atmospheric quality of the mountain’s summit is striking. Yoshida is among only a handful of artists that could achieve this masterful effect in woodblock prints.

Connoisseur's Note

This impression is a rarely seen trial printing executed prior to the standard edition, bearing the shizuri (trial) seal at the upper left margin, just below the early large red jizuri seal. In addition to the jizuri seal, the print has brush and pencil signatures indicating it was produced under Yoshida’s strict supervision. The large red Jizuri seal along with the title at the left margin further suggests this print is one of the earliest printings of the design.

This trial impression differentiates itself from other known impressions by its brighter coloration and bolder use of bokashi (color gradation), which create a stronger atmospheric quality throughout the print.

This trial print required the use of several additional printing blocks, compared to the standard version, to produce the stronger intensity of colors as well as striking contrasting bokashi. This impression is a rare glimpse of the artist at work in the start of his printmaking career. At this time, Yoshida was deliberating on how to best produce prints with the highest artistic quality while hammering out the economic viability of his production methods. The rarity and expressive quality of this early experimental impression are exceptional.