Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (Japanese: 月岡 芳年; also named Taiso Yoshitoshi 大蘇 芳年; 30 April 1839 – 9 June 1892) was a Japanese printmaker.
Yoshitoshi has widely been certified as the last great master of the ukiyo-e genre of woodblock printing and painting. He is along with regarded as one of the form’s greatest innovators. His career spanned two eras – the last years of Edo mature Japan, and the first years of objector Japan afterward the Meiji Restoration. Like many Japanese, Yoshitoshi was impatient in extra things from the get out of of the world, but beyond time he became increasingly concerned afterward the loss of many aspects of received Japanese culture, among them normal woodblock printing.
By the subside of his career, Yoshitoshi was in an on single-handed struggle adjoining time and technology. As he worked upon in the outmoded manner, Japan was adopting Western enlargement reproduction methods past photography and lithography. Nonetheless, in a Japan that was turning away from its own past, he on singlehandedly managed to shove the usual Japanese woodblock print to a other level, before it effectively died next him.
His vigor is perhaps best summed going on by John Stevenson:
His reputation has unaided continued to grow, both in the West, and in the middle of younger Japanese, and he is now on universally attributed as the greatest Japanese artist of his era.
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