The Castle of Chillon

The Château de Chillon stands on a rocky islet at the eastern end of Lake Geneva, and Yoshida's print almost certainly shows the castle's medieval stone towers reflected in the still water of the lake, with the Alpine foothills rising behind. This composition would have suited Yoshida's characteristic use of horizontal registers — sky, mountain, castle, and mirror-like reflection — separated by fine gradations of color rather than hard outlines. Lake Geneva's calm surface offered an opportunity for the doubled-image compositions Yoshida employed in Japanese subjects such as Fuji reflections, here transposed to a European context. The stone masonry and battlements are rendered through careful key-block line work, while the surrounding water and atmosphere rely on multiple overprinted transparent washes. Yoshida printed this subject during his European travels, and it stands alongside his Swiss mountain prints as evidence of his commitment to documenting Western landmarks through a Japanese technical vocabulary, using [washi](/glossary/washi) and [baren](/glossary/baren)-applied water-based pigments throughout.