Golden Pagoda in Rangoon

Depicts the Shwedagon Pagoda, the gilded Buddhist stupa that dominates the skyline of Rangoon (now Yangon, Myanmar). The print belongs to Yoshida's 1931–1932 series produced after his 1930 travels through India, Burma, Singapore, and Malaysia. Such subjects gave him an opportunity to apply bokashi gradation to the warm tonalities of weathered gilding and the soft tropical light surrounding the monument. Yoshida typically modeled monumental architecture three-dimensionally, drawing on his Western academic training in oil painting to render form through subtle shifts of pigment rather than the flatter areas of color characteristic of earlier ukiyo-e. The print would have required a substantial number of impressions to layer the gold surfaces and the surrounding atmosphere. It sits alongside his prints of Indian temples and palaces as part of a sustained engagement with religious architecture encountered on foreign travel.