Edutainment > Yoshida Hiroshi Prints - The Europe Series

Hiroshi Yoshida - Biography
The Matterhorn - No. 18
copyright Yoshida family

Hiroshi Yoshida and his wife Fujio had left the United States in April 1925 for Europe. Hiroshi had been in Europe before to study Western art from 1903 to 1905.

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The Europe Series

Hiroshi Yoshida made sketches in Switzerland, Italy and in Greece, which he saw for the first time. The shortest way home to Japan was via the Suez Canal in Egypt, where Hiroshi made sketches of the famous Sphinx.

15. The Jungfrau - 1925
16. The Wetterhorn - 1925
17. The Breithorn - 1925
18. The Matterhorn - 1925
19. The Matterhorn at Night - 1925
20. The Town of Lugano - 1925
21. A Canal in Venice - 1925
22. The Acropolis Ruins - 1925
23. The Acropolis Ruins at Night - 1925
24. The Sphinx - 1925
25. The Sphinx at Night- 1925

Establishing the Yoshida Studios

Hiroshi Yoshida Prints
A Canal in Venice - No. 25
copyright Yoshida family

Hiroshi and Fujio arrived in Japan in August 1925. The couple had left their homeland a little less than two years ago. Hiroshi was now 49 years old. In the United States he had experienced a very lively interest for his prints and for Japanese woodblocks in general. On the other hand he had seen only minor enthusiasm for his paintings.

Encouraged by his US and European experiences, Yoshida had decided to go seriously into printmaking. Back at home he deployed all his energy and considerable financial means to establish himself as an independent printmaker and become his own publisher. He hired a number of carvers and printers such as Yamagishi Kazue and Maeda Yujiro and personally learned the skills of carving and printing.

By the end of 1925, the United States prints and the European print series had been brought to the market. Hiroshi Yoshida mentioned in a later publication the amount of USD 150,000 that the establishment of his own workshop had required in salaries, tools, room space and that it took 10 years to get the return on this investment.

The sales of the United States and Europe series went well. Hiroshi Yoshida prints have never been cheap, by the way. An old sales catalog published for the Toledo exhibition of 1930 lists Hiroshi Yoshida prints with a price of USD 10 to USD 20. It is interesting to look at the relative value of these prices on the basis of an average income of an unskilled worker. USD 10 corresponds to about USD 650 in 2002. To give you another idea about the value of one dollar in those days: The famous Ford T-model had a price of USD 290 in 1925.

Dieter Wanczura
(August 2002, updated April 2009)

Literature source used for this page about Hiroshi Yoshida prints

• "The complete Woodblock Prints of Yoshida Hiroshi", published by ABE Corporation, ISBN 4-87242-121-3.
• Amy Reigle Stephens, "The New Wave - Twentieth Century Japanese Prints from the Robert O. Muller Collection", Bamboo Publishing Ltd. London und Hotei - Japanese Prints, Leiden, ISBN 1-870076-19-2.
• Helen Merritt, "Modern Japanese Woodblock Prints - The early years", published by University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1990, ISBN 0-8248-1200-X.

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