Kumoi-Zakura (Kumoi Cherry Trees)
Hiroshi Yoshida1920
The Toledo Museum of Art
Toledo, United States
Based on his watercolor painting of 1904, this woodblock print by Hiroshi Yoshida shows a dreamlike, misty moonlit scene of two young women viewing the famed spring cherry blossoms at Mount Yoshino, east of Osaka.
Kumoi Cherry Trees is printed in the largest format Yoshida ever used for his woodblocks. Printing an image of this size is very difficult and requires a team of printers. It is especially tricky to get the correct registration (the alignment of the different woodblocks for each color). For this image the blossoms of the cherry tree had to be printed in three sections, requiring three different impressions to get them to align perfectly with the branches.
- Title: Kumoi-Zakura (Kumoi Cherry Trees)
- Creator: Hiroshi Yoshida
- Creator Lifespan: 1876 - 1950
- Creator Nationality: Japanese
- Creator Gender: male
- Creator Birth Place: Kurume, Japan
- Date Created: 1920
- Physical Location: Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio
- Location Created: Japan
- Physical Dimensions: w451 x h294 mm (Complete)
- Type: Print
- Rights: https://toledomuseum.org/collection/image-resources/
- External Link: Toledo Museum of Art
- Medium: Color woodblock print
- Fun Fact: A dreamlike image of misty beauty, Hiroshi Yoshida's woodblock print Kumoi Cherry Trees is based on the artist's watercolor of the same title painted in 1904. It depicts two women (daughters of fellow artist Kawai Shintô) viewing the famed cherry trees at Mount Yoshino, east of Osaka, in the moonlight. Yoshida was trained in Western-style art in Japan, and through the initial interest of wealthy American industrialist and art collector Charles L. Freer (1854-1919), he found great success with his paintings in America, enabling him to travel widely, recording foreign landscapes and monuments in paint. His successes abroad mirrored those at home in Japan, where he was considered one of the leading Western-style painters.In 1920 he began to create woodblock prints with the noted publisher Watanabe Shozaburo, who also worked with Hashiguchi Goyo (see 1939.92). After a short collaboration Yoshida became his own publisher in 1925. By this time he had become a skilled carver and printer, believing that "those who relied on the skills of others must be able to surpass them." Kumoi Cherry Trees is an example of Yoshida pushing the boundaries of the traditional woodblock print, not only with the delicacy and emotional quality of the colors, but also with the print's exceptionally large size.In 1929 Yoshida worked with the Toledo Museum of Art to organize A Special Exhibition of Modern Japanese Prints, shown in 1930 and consisting of 342 works by ten artists. Due to the success of this show, another was held in 1936. Many of the prints from these shows are now in the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art, including Kumoi Cherry Trees and more than two hundred other prints by Yoshida.
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