Island Palaces in Udaipur

Udaipur — the City of Lakes in Rajasthan, built around a series of interconnected artificial lakes, with the historic City Palace and the famous Lake Palace (now a luxury hotel) rising directly from the water of Lake Pichola — provided Yoshida with one of his most painterly Indian subjects during his 1932 travels. The island palaces of Udaipur float on the lake surface with an almost hallucinatory elegance, their white marble and sandstone architecture reflected in the still water below, the surrounding Aravalli hills providing a distant frame. Yoshida's composition captures the dreamlike quality of architecture built on water, a subject that combined his experiences of similar views — the lake palaces of Rajasthan, the palaces and temples of Srinagar's Dal Lake — into a meditation on the human desire to build in the very element that most resists permanence.