El Capitan

El Capitan — the three-thousand-foot granite monolith rising from the floor of Yosemite Valley in California, one of the largest exposed granite faces on earth — provided Yoshida with a subject of monumental geological scale during his 1925 North American travels. The sheer vertical immensity of El Capitan, which rises nearly a kilometer above the valley floor and presents an unbroken wall of light-grey granite to the valley, demanded a compositional approach unlike anything the Japanese Alps had required: here, the mountain was not a summit with slopes and snowfields but a wall of stone, its face catching and releasing light in subtle variations across an otherwise uniform grey surface. Yoshida's treatment of this distinctly American geological spectacle brought his oil painter's sensitivity to granite to bear on a landscape of global significance.