Yoshida | Temple Gate, Eight Scenes of Cherry Blossoms

Hiroshi Yoshida (1876–1950)

Hiroshi Yoshida is perhaps the second best known Shin Hanga artist, after Hasui. Trained as a painter from a young age, he showed his work at the Detroit Museum of Art in 1899, making him among the first Japanese artists to gain a reputation in the United States. Eventually, like so many of his contemporaries, he worked for Watanabe Shozaburo producing landscape prints. While many were set in Japan, he traveled extensively and produced several wonderful designs of American subjects, such as New York skyscrapers, the Pittsburgh waterfront and national parks, and European subjects, such as Lake Como in Italy. His prints always had a distinctly painterly feel, as if they’d fallen off a watercolor brush.