Chikugo River

The Chikugo, the largest river in Kyushu, runs through Fukuoka Prefecture and Yoshida's birthplace of Kurume, giving the subject personal weight unusual in his otherwise far-traveled oeuvre. The print would likely show a stretch of the river under a particular light — perhaps fishermen working from low boats, the broad flow under haze, or a seasonal view of the embankments — rendered with the atmospheric sensitivity that defines his landscape work. Yoshida's river prints typically employ extensive bokashi gradation across the water, sometimes carried so far that the same blocks were re-printed in alternate color states for morning, midday, and evening impressions. Within his broader output, dominated by foreign travel subjects and the Japanese Alps, the Chikugo represents one of his returns to the Kyushu landscape of his upbringing, and connects to a strand of place-specific work rooted in the topography he knew earliest and most intimately.