Sukeyoshi is a smith of the period, working under the single character cut by the school that flourished at Fukuoka, Yoshioka, Katayama and Iwato. The published sources give his lineage from the signature compendia: "according to the , Sukeyoshi was a son of Fukuoka Sukefusa, and by one account the founder of the Yoshioka line." That double placement is the problem of his name. -name smiths are recorded in both the Fukuoka and Yoshioka groups, and three signed Jūyō Bijutsuhin catalogued together, though all judged Fukuoka , are said to differ enough in the manner of their signatures that the published sources will not commit them to a single hand. His record therefore reads as two manners drawn by the judges themselves rather than as one even style, and the second character of his identity is settled less by a personal tell than by era and school.
The first manner is the signed two-character , and it reads archaic. The published commentary calls the and old at a glance and identifies the work as Ko- of the early , the generation that comes immediately after . Over a well-packed , at times an closely forged, fine gathers and a vivid stands clearly. The temper here is comparatively calm: a -toned base broken into a small , into which and small are mixed in a - manner, with and working well in , laid in and running through, the a . The two-character signature is cut boldly at the very end of the tang, and the judges call its manner of inscription pleasing. One of these carries the character ue above the name; the published sources note this is to be read "tatematsuru", with other examples known, signifying that the smith presented the blade to the patron who had commissioned it.
The is the constant across both manners. , tightening at times into a fine and elsewhere standing a little open, carries and that bright of old steel on every example, signed and unsigned alike. On the more refined pieces the forging closes up and the reflection only grows clearer; on the wider attributions the grain stands more, tending toward -tatsu, and enters with mixed into the . It is the he shares with the whole school, and the surface against which his two tempers are read.
The second manner is the flamboyant one for which Fukuoka is named, seen on the attributions. The published sources describe the mid- Fukuoka style as "the most splendid and richly varied large-pattern ," and it was on exactly such a temper that the connoisseur Tadaaki rendered his judgment. On a greatly shortened, unsigned he cut a gold-inlaid attribution to Sukeyoshi, reasoning from the blade's brilliant large-pattern that the hand was the Fukuoka rather than the Yoshioka Sukeyoshi. That blade shows a mixed with and over an with , and entering, adhering, and through it, the a tending to with . A wide shortened of the character has a leaning to and a that inclines to . Where the signed work is quiet and old, these are showy and full of variation.
What sets him apart within is held in that contrast. Against the plainer smiths who precede him, his signed is brighter in its and gathers on the edge where theirs run quieter. Against the full mid- flowering of the school at Fukuoka, his archaic signed manner stands a half-generation earlier, the Ko- root from which that flowering grew, even as his attributed work carries the later flamboyant temper forward. The published sources keep the two faces honestly side by side, judging the unsigned blades Fukuoka "from every point" while granting that they "cannot be readily decided to be by the hand," so that what is fixed about him is the school and the period rather than the individual.
For the collector he is a rare early name. Fujishiro grades him Jō-jō , and the Tōkō Taikan values him in the upper-middle range of the old masters. He has no National Treasures and no Important Cultural Properties; his record runs through the rank and the prewar Jūyō Bijutsuhin, the signed early- held by the published sources to be sound and of fine quality. His blades carry good provenance: a signed from the Tsugaru house, another recorded in the Sasaki collection, and a great transmitted in the Uesugi family and attributed by tradition to his hand, with a piece now in the Hayashibara Museum of Art among the recorded whereabouts. Only a couple of his works fall in the tier, and signed Sukeyoshi survives in just a handful of examples, so one comes to light only seldom. A privately held signed Sukeyoshi is a notable thing for a collector to encounter, and a document of how the passed from its archaic beginnings into its great flowering.
