Lot 7103
Hiroshi Yoshida (Japanese, 1876-1950), Yozakura in Rain
Lot Details & Additional Photographs
15 3/4 x 10 3/4 in.
From the Collection of William Arthur and Ferol Smith, Pennsylvania, and by descent
William Arthur Smith (1918–1989) was an American artist, illustrator, portraitist, and international cultural ambassador whose work was profoundly influenced by his experiences in Asia. He began his professional career in New York in the late 1930s, where he illustrated books, ghostwrote the comic strip Polly and Her Pals, and taught at the Grand Central School of Art. From the 1940s through the mid-1960s, his illustrations appeared frequently in The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, and Redbook, and he created advertising art for companies including Coca-Cola, Remington, U.S. Steel, John Hancock, and Dow Chemical.
During World War II, Smith served with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in China. His years in China had a lasting influence on his artistic interests and his subsequent engagement with Asia. After the war, he and his wife, artist Ferol Stratton, lived in Paris from 1949 to 1951.
Smith's involvement with international art and cultural exchange expanded throughout the 1950s and 1960s. He lectured in Athens, Manila, and Warsaw and served as an official delegate to the International Association of Art in Venice in 1954. In 1958, he traveled to the Soviet Union as a member and official delegate under a cultural exchange agreement. He subsequently traveled extensively throughout Asia on State Department-sponsored cultural exchanges, lecturing and exhibiting his work in countries including the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, Burma (Myanmar), Nepal, India, Japan, and Turkey.
Smith was also a collector of Asian art, reflecting his sustained personal and professional interest in the region. He moved from New York to Pineville, Pennsylvania, in 1956. His work is held in the collections of numerous museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Portrait Gallery, National Gallery of Art, Michener Art Museum, and Norman Rockwell Museum.
Hiroshi Yoshida was a celebrated Japanese painter and printmaker and a leading figure of the shin-hanga movement. Trained in Western-style painting, he traveled extensively throughout Europe, the United States, North Africa, India, and Asia, incorporating these experiences into his distinctive landscape compositions. Yoshida is particularly renowned for his technically accomplished woodblock prints, which combine traditional Japanese printing methods with Western approaches to perspective, light, and atmosphere. His works are held in major museum collections worldwide and remain among the most highly regarded Japanese prints of the early twentieth century.
Good estate condition; some dirt and rubbing to upper right corner; a light crease to upper right corner; some scattered areas with pigment in the margins; some light overall even toning to paper.
