Japanese Woodblock Print

YOSHIDA Toshi . Woodblock print (mokuhanga) – Shin Hanga. Lifetime edition – hand-signed by the artist. 27.5 × 20.5 cm (10.8 × 8 inches) image; larger sheet with margins on thick washi paper. Pencil signed “Toshi Yoshida” in the lower right margin; titled “Sangetsu-an, Hakone Museum” in pencil in the lower left margin; brush signature and red artist’s seal within the image. Impression & Colors: Superb, crisp impression with vivid, fresh colors throughout. The rich autumn palette – vibrant reds, deep oranges, warm golds, and lush greens – is beautifully preserved with exceptional clarity and depth. The fine detail in the bark textures, foliage, and stone pathway demonstrates the outstanding quality of this lifetime impression. Color registration is precise across all blocks. Paper: Excellent condition, consistent with a near-new state. The thick, high-quality Japanese washi paper is clean and bright with minimal toning. The deckle edges are intact and well preserved. No foxing, tears, creases, or restoration. A remarkably well-kept example. Autumn at the Sangetsu-an Teahouse. This luminous composition captures the Sangetsu-an (, “Mountain Moon Hermitage”), a historic teahouse nestled within the grounds of the Hakone Museum of Art in the mountains of Kanagawa Prefecture. Yoshida frames the scene through an arrangement of elegant birch and pine trees, their trunks rendered with meticulous attention to the mottled bark textures. A winding stone path leads the eye through the garden toward a traditional wooden gate, beyond which glimpses of further autumnal colour beckon. A stone lantern at right anchors the composition, while the canopy above blazes with the full spectrum of Japanese autumn – fiery maple reds, amber yellows, and persisting deep greens. The technical achievement is remarkable. The print employs an extraordinary number of colour blocks to achieve the rich, layered palette of the autumn foliage, with subtle gradations and overprinting creating an almost three-dimensional sense of depth. Yoshida Toshi: Heir to a Printmaking Dynasty. The eldest son of the celebrated shin-hanga master Hiroshi Yoshida, Toshi grew up immersed in printmaking – learning oil painting and block carving from his father’s studio from childhood. After studying at the Pacific Painting Association and traveling extensively with his father through India, Southeast Asia, and beyond, he developed a distinctive artistic voice that honoured the family tradition while pushing its boundaries. The landscape prints of the early 1950s, including this Hakone Museum series, represent a pivotal moment in Toshi’s career – created in the years immediately following his father’s death in 1950, they are among his last major works in the naturalistic shin-hanga tradition before he turned to bold abstract experimentation. These prints stand as a culmination of the Yoshida landscape legacy: technically refined, emotionally evocative, and produced with the full resources of the family workshop. Toshi’s work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the British Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, among many others. Rarity & Collecting Note. This is a lifetime edition, hand-signed in pencil by Toshi Yoshida – the most desirable category for collectors. Unlike the later posthumous impressions and raised-seal editions produced after the artist’s health declined, lifetime pencil-signed impressions were created under Toshi’s direct supervision and bear his personal approval. The exceptional, near-new condition of this example is particularly rare for a print over seventy years old, making it an outstanding opportunity for collectors of the Yoshida family’s work and Japanese twentieth-century printmaking.