The beautiful art of

Gesso Yoshimoto 1881-1936

Very little is known about the Japanese shin hanga artist Gesso Yoshimoto. But when the famous collector and art dealer Robert O. Muller passed away in 2003, he left in his collection a very large number of beautiful woodblock prints by this artist.

Kacho-e and Landscape Prints

Known are a large number of landscape print designs and kacho-e (images of birds and flowers). They were published by Hasegawa and by Nishinomiya Yosaku. The designs are very well made from an aspect of craftsmanship and artistic composition.

Gesso Yoshimoto must have had an art training in traditional Japanese painting. He may even have been a painter, and his designs may have been transformed by professional carvers and printers into woodblock prints on commission of the publishers Hasegawa and Nishinomiya.

But we really do not know. This is a guess. The woodblock prints however make the impression as if they had been designed specifically for export, mainly to the United States and Europe. This was typical for the shin hanga art movement.

Two swallows and Wisteria

Click on ''Gesso Yoshimoto'' above and request free access to PDF file for more works by this artist.

The Sakura Obsession

by Naoko Abe

The incredible story of Collingwood Ingram (1880-1981), the plant hunter who saved Japan's cherry blossoms.
Vintage Books, New York, 2020. $19.00

Each year, the flowering of cherry blossoms marks the beginning of spring. But if it weren't for the pioneering work of an English eccentric, Collingwood ''Cherry'' Ingram, Japan's beloved cherry blossoms could have gone extinct. Ingram first fell in love with the sakura, or cherry tree, when he visited Japan on his honeymoon in 1907 and was so taken with the plant that he brought back hundreds of cuttings with him to England. Years later, upon learning that the Great White Cherry had virtually disappeared from Japan, he buried a living cutting from his own collection in a potato and repatriated it via the Trans-Siberian Railway. In the years that followed, Ingram sent more than one hundred varieties of cherry tree to new homes around the globe. As much a history of the cherry blossom in Japan as it is the story of one remarkable man, The Sakura Obsession follows the flower from its significance as a symbol of the imperial court, through the dark days of the Second World War, and up to the present-day worldwide fascination with this iconic blossom.
Naoko Abe is a Japanese journalist and nonfiction writer. She was the first female political writer to cover the Japanese prime minister's office, the foreign ministry, and the defense ministry at Mainichi Chimbun, one of Japan's largest newspapers. Since moving to London with her British husband and their two sons in 2001, she has worked as a freelance writer and has published five books in Japanese. Her biography of Collingwood Ingram in Japanese won the prestigious Nihon Essayist Club Award, and  she has now rewritten the book with new material for English language readers.

Three different faces of

Prunus incisa 'Kojo-no-mai'

(Dance of the lake)

in

Hortus Godotii

June © Hans van den Bos

October © Hans van den Bos

November © Hans van den Bos

A small impression of Hortus Godotii

4th June, 2020

Japanese maples in April 2020

Acer japonicum 'Green Cascade' 

Acer palmatum 'Atropurpureum'

Acer palmatum 'Butterfly'

Acer palmatum 'Chitose-yama'

Acer palmatum 'Viridis'

Acer palmatum 'Katsura'

Acer palmatum 'Orange dream'

Photographs © Hans van den Bos