Lugano

Yoshida depicted Lugano, the Swiss-Italian lakeside city in the canton of Ticino, during one of his European travels, applying the woodblock medium to an Alpine setting defined by Mediterranean light, steep wooded hillsides, and the still surface of Lago di Lugano. The subject offered Yoshida a layered recession from foreground lakeside elements through the city's pastel-colored buildings to the surrounding mountains — a compositional structure well suited to his approach of organizing depth through carefully overlapping color planes. European subjects required Yoshida to adapt the bokashi and overprinting techniques developed for Japanese landscapes to the different chromatic and architectural character of Southern European settings, including the warm stone of Lugano's buildings and the particular blue-grey of alpine lake water. The print exemplifies the shin-hanga movement's reach beyond Japan and Yoshida's role as its most internationally traveled practitioner.