Yoshida Hiroshi was born in Kurume, Fukuoka Prefecture, the second son of Ueda Tsukane, a schoolteacher of samurai descent. He studied drawing with Yoshida Kasaburo, who adopted him in 1891 and whose name he took. In 1893, he went to Kyoto to study painting, and the following year traveled to Tokyo to enroll in Koyama Shotaro's private art school and the Meiji Fine Arts Society, both of which taught Western painting. From 1899 to 1901, he made the first of his many trips to the USA and Europe, where he sold several watercolors. In 1902, he and Ishikawa Toraji participated in the reorganization of the Meiji Fine Arts Society, which they renamed the Pacific Painting Association (Taiheiyo-Gaikai). He traveled again to Europe, North Africa, and North America from 1903 to 1907 with his sister-in-law Fujio (1887-1987), also a painter, whom he married upon their return to Japan. He then established himself as a painter and achieved considerable success with his light style, inspired by Western art, but he often clashed with the traditional Japanese art establishment.
n 1920, Yoshida began making prints for the publisher Watanabe Shôsaburô, who was looking for an artist in the Western style. All his blocks and prints were destroyed in the Great Kantō Earthquake of September 1923. He returned to the USA to raise money for the victims and realized that prints were highly valued. Upon his return, he established his own business, the Yoshida Studio. From 1925 onward, Yoshida devoted himself to printmaking, controlling every stage of production with high standards of quality. Many of his prints were landscapes, primarily inspired by his travels (India in 1930, China and Korea in 1936). In 1938, he was appointed an official war artist and returned to China several times. He was one of the organizers of the two exhibitions in Toledo, Ohio, in 1930 and 1936 that opened the American market to Japanese artists, and published a book on printmaking techniques in English in 1939 (Japanese Woodblock Printing, Sanseido ed.). He made his last print in 1946, then devoted himself to painting. In 1950, he fell ill during a trip to Izu and died in Tokyô that same year.
Several of his families (his sons Toshi a.o.) became woodblock print artists as well.
