Your art history post for today: by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839-1892), Viewing fireworks from a boat in the evening cool, ink, colour, gold and gofun on silk, 11¼ x 12½ in. (28.5 x 31.8 cm), photo: Sotheby’s London 14 December 2021. (Gofun is a white pigment made from crushed oyster shells.) #arthistory #asianart #artspout

Information on the artist, from the Philadelphia Museum of Art: “Tsukioka Yoshitoshi was the last great master of the traditional Japanese color woodcut genre known as ukiyo-e. Yoshitoshi came of age as an artist during Japan’s dramatic cultural transformation in the 1860s, after the country opened to international trade after two hundred years of isolation. Just as his country struggled to reconcile its reverence for tradition with the realities of the modern world, Yoshitoshi navigated a range of traditional and contemporary themes in his prints: the heroism of samurai warriors, poetic images of figures in nature, female beauty, historic accounts, ghost stories, and the horrors of the battlefield. Across his diverse output, he masterfully incorporated Western visual concepts of foreshortening and perspective that were popular during the Meiji period (1868–1912).”

Martin Luther King, by Ben Shahn (1898-1969), offset lithograph, 28 5/8x22 inches (725x557 mm), full margins. As a print, it appears in many collections. The original drawing for the lithograph was done for the cover of Time magazine, March 19, 1965. #artspout #arthistory #martinlutherkingday2025

"For an article on activism in Selma, the editors of Time commissioned Shahn, a Jewish American artist and labor activist, to create a portrait of King for the cover. Shahn elected to portray the reverend in mid-speech, pairing his line drawing with a loosely applied ink wash." - Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023), which covers the collection of the Amon Carter Museum, the institution that owns the original drawing.