YOSHIDA Hiroshi began traveling abroad in his twenties, and actively introduced works by Japanese painters overseas along with his own paintings. Struck by the eager demand for good prints during his third United States visit, YOSHIDA promptly hired carvers and printers on his return and devoted his career to prints, supervising all aspects of their production. “El Capitan” is a 1000-meter high granite monolith in Yosemite Valley. The simple composition of this work, with El Capitan filling the picture, vividly conveys the huge monolith’s appearance and power.

A seasoned mountaineer, YOSHIDA set up camp in the mountains every summer and sketched the moment-to-moment beauty of the changing mountain landscapes. This is a particularly beautiful woodblock print from his Twelve Scenes in the Japan Alps series undertaken in 1926. Shown is the ridge of Mt. Tsurugi dyed red by the morning sun with clouds boiling in the summer sky. In the foreground is the camp, enveloped in darkness. By means of color gradations and delicate variations born of his printing technique, the artist has splendidly expressed the dynamism of a vast natural landscape.

The first work of Yoshida’s The Inland Sea Series seascapes. As its title suggests, the sea’s glittering surface commands our attention, its gleaming light skillfully expressed by cuts with a round chisel. In his woodblock prints, YOSHIDA sought to depict changing light and atmosphere with the realism of Western-style painting and a sense of color fostered in watercolor painting. The print’s supremely delicate expression, transcending even traditional ukiyo-e, was born of the artist’s profound understanding of carving and printing techniques he himself mastered.

Here, depicting in closeup a motif he himself once painted in oils, YOSHIDA has focused on the fascination of flowing water. In woodblock print production, multiple blocks are used for overprinting colors. The more blocks used, the more difficult production will be. The larger the paper sheet, moreover, the more the moistened paper expands and contracts, making misalignments likely to occur. Despite its 54.5cm x 82.8cm paper, abnormally large for woodblock printing, this work is powerful masterpiece, brought to a high degree of completion without the slightest printing misalignment.

YOSHIDA’s travels to India and Southeast Asia brought new expressive forms to his woodblock prints. In this scene of an ancient capital in northern India, the outlines are restrained, and light—filtering through elaborate arabesques typical of Islamic architecture—is expressed by overprinting pale relative colors. The work, based on one of many sketches made during the artist’s dream trip to the Himalayas, is suffused with golden light for a hallucinatory effect transcending the on-site sketch.

YOSHIDA Hiroshi’s woodblock prints are distinguished by the unrivaled number of wood blocks they use. His precise realism, a quality one would not expect in a woodblock print, was achieved by painstakingly overprinting with a plurality of blocks. Using more than 30 blocks on average, Yoshida created Yomei Gate by an unimaginably complex process involving 96 blocks. The print conveys not only the building’s ornate structure and archaic elegance but also its atmosphere as sanctuary of long history.