Rui Yoshida

Rui Yoshida (1864-1954), is one of the most important early figures visible to the scrutiny of the historian in a study of the Yoshida family, a well-known family of Japanese artists. Although not an artist herself, at critical points through three generations she nurtured and shaped the artists who built the family’s name in modern Western-style Japanese art.

(All Japanese names here have been written in the Western order, personal name first followed by family name.)

Early family history

In the mid-1800s the Yoshida family served the Nakatsu warrior clan in Ôita Prefecture on the island of Kyushu. They created paintings for the clan in the traditional Japanese style of the time. Rui was born into that family. However, no males were born who could carry on the Yoshida name and their work. As was often done in Japan at the time, a family without a male heir would select and adopt a male from another family. Kasaburo Haruno (1861-1894), whose father was a painter for the Nakatsu clan in another area, was selected to marry Rui in the early 1880s and was then adopted by Rui’s parents. Kasaburo had been trained by early Western-style artists in Kyoto in sketch, watercolors, and oils. He later became the art teacher at Shuyukan High School in Fukuoka City. There he started an art club and wrote a manual on modern painting methods, becoming a pioneer in Western-style oils.

Rui bore four daughters, which led her and Kasaburo to adopt a male from another family, just as Rui’s father had done. One of Kasaburo’s most promising students was Hiroshi Ueda (1876-1950). In 1891 they adopted him. Hiroshi Yoshida was immediately sent to study with leading Western-style artists in Kyoto. Kasaburo died at the age of 33, just three years after adopting Hiroshi. That meant, in effect, that the 18 year-old Hiroshi, with Rui his adoptive mother, took over as head of the Yoshida family which now numbered five children.

New leadership

In the same year that Kasaburo died, Hiroshi took the family to Tokyo where he could study with even more important artists. During these difficult times, Rui, who probably had been instrumental with her husband in choosing Hiroshi, now supported and guided him. For example, she ground pigments, mixed them with oil, and put them into tubes for Hiroshi to use. At this time, as well as later, Rui was the strength behind the scenes. But she had also chosen Hiroshi because he showed signs of strength and leadership.

In 1907 Hiroshi married his adoptive sister Fujio Yoshida, the one who showed the most talent in art. He had actually tutored her before they married and that continued. Much of what Fujio did at this young age reflected Hiroshi’s style. But as time when on, the talent Hiroshi had seen in Fujio began to show independent insight and genius. (The large exhibit of Fujio’s work in 2002 at the Fuchu City (Tokyo) Museum verified that.) That is one reason joint exhibits of Fujio’s and Hiroshi’s work in the early 1900s in the United States generated so many sales and were wildly popular with the American art public.

Nurturing in difficult times

Fujio’s first child, daughter Chisato, was born in 1908. A son, Toshi Yoshida (1911-1995), followed in 1911. Two months after this, Chisato died, and within a year Toshi contracted infantile paralysis. Fujio had placed both children under the care of others while she followed Hiroshi’s urging that she advance her career.

After tragedy struck both of her children, she blamed herself, fell into prolonged grief, and ceased painting for almost ten years. During that time Rui took care of her, the disabled Toshi, and the household. Rui would read to the young Toshi in bed and tell him stories. When Hiroshi and Fujio went to the United States in 1923-1925, Rui and Toshi stayed with Rui’s son, Masao. During that time she encouraged Toshi to learn to sketch animals, because that would differentiate him from his father.

Toshi was the designated heir to the Yoshida tradition. His father, however, was just as demanding of him as he had been of Fujio. After a grueling trip by Hiroshi and the 19 year-old Toshi to India and through the far East, father and son returned home with Toshi terribly tired and depressed. Once again, it was Rui who calmed Toshi. At a time when Hiroshi forbade Toshi even to listen to the radio, she directed him to Western novels and music, and nursed him back to health. In later years, Toshi was unequivocal. It was not his father or his mother, but his grandmother Rui, who was most instrumental in his becoming an artist. In Toshi’s first large print, Ishiyama Temple, his first print after World War II, he portrayed its interior, and to one side there is an old woman, bent over, wearing glasses, and walking with a cane. This was his homage to Rui.

Toshi was right, not only about Rui’s profound influence on himself as an artist, but also because she was a force for stability, continuity, nurture, and inspiration for the whole family. The larger story of the Yoshida family shows clearly how the Japanese have often enhanced certain desirable traits in their families, in a sense inserting desirable genes by means of adoption and arranged marriage. Above and beyond this, Rui by strength of character guided and nurtured individuals in her family through three generations, resulting in her family’s depth and diversity of artistic talent. Because of this the Yoshida family has been able to reflect the broad range of developments in modern Japanese art history.

Sources: Yasunaga, Hiroshi Yoshida Exhibition, A Master of Modern Landscape Painting - Refreshingly Original and Lyrical, Fukuoka Art Museum and Kawaguchiko Museum of Art, 1996, Japanese, (Koichi Yasunaga is the leader in research on Yoshida family history); Skibbe, Yoshida Toshi: Nature, Art, and Peace, Seascape, 1996; Yamamura, Yoshida Fujio: A Painter of Radiance, Fuchu Art Museum, 2002, Japanese and English; Allen, et al, A Japanese Legacy: Four Generations of Yoshida Family Artists, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2002.