artist: Toshi Yoshida (Japanese 1911-1995)
medium: original wood block print
dimensions: 43 x 37 cm frame size (approx)
hand signed in pencil
circa 1939
* a copy of this print is held in a number of the important collections worldwide including the NGV here in Melbourne - it can be viewed HERE
* presented in a new hand finished timber frame with double thick archival mat and backing, and non-reflective UV museum glass
AU $1245 (approx US $810 / 695 EUROS / 120,000 yen / 600 GBP - for exact current conversion visit xe.com)
artist biography
Tōshi Yoshida (吉田 遠志, Yoshida Tōshi; July 25, 1911 – July 1, 1995) was a prominent Japanese printmaker associated with the sōsaku-hanga (creative print) movement. The son of renowned shin-hanga (new print) landscape artist Hiroshi Yoshida, Tōshi forged a distinct artistic path over the course of his long career.Tōshi Yoshida’s early life was shaped by illness—one of his legs was paralyzed in childhood, preventing him from attending school. Instead, he spent time observing animals and watching his father work in the family’s printmaking studio. With encouragement from his grandmother, Rui Yoshida, young Tōshi began sketching animals, a subject that would later become central to his work.
Yoshida's early artistic development was marked by a tension between honoring his father’s legacy and establishing his own voice. In 1926, he began focusing on animals as his primary subject matter, deliberately diverging from Hiroshi’s landscape focus. However, in the 1930s, Tōshi began creating landscapes similar to those of his father. The two traveled together to India, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and Burma between 1930 and 1931, often painting side by side.
In 1940, he married Kiso Yoshida (née Katsura), and together they had five sons.
Yoshida's early career unfolded during a period of political and artistic repression. As an apprentice in the Yoshida family workshop, he worked with limited artistic autonomy. Under Japan’s militarist regime, art was subject to censorship. In 1943, he produced oil paintings portraying factory workers and civilians involved in the war effort. After World War II, responding to economic need, he created a series of seventeen landscape prints in 1951 aimed at American military personnel and their families.
The death of Hiroshi Yoshida in 1950 marked a turning point in Tōshi’s career. He decisively broke away from naturalism and embraced abstraction. Beginning in 1952, and inspired in part by his brother Hodaka Yoshida, Tōshi embarked on a series of abstract woodcuts. His travels to the United States, Mexico, the Middle East, and the UK in 1953 led to exhibitions at thirty museums and galleries across eighteen U.S. states. Between 1954 and 1973, he produced over 300 non-objective prints.
In the 1970s, Yoshida returned to his lifelong fascination with the natural world. His 1971 work Humming Bird and Fuchsia marked the beginning of a new phase focused on animals, especially birds. This direction deepened following his travels to Africa in 1972. From then until his death in 1995, Yoshida devoted himself almost exclusively to animal imagery.
In addition to his prints, Yoshida illustrated children’s books, often writing and illustrating his own stories as part of the Animal Picture Book series.