The Evening in Venice

Venice at evening — its canal water darkening to black, its palaces and churches glowing amber from the last sunlight or from lanterns beginning to light in the gathering dusk — provided Yoshida with one of his most sustained European subjects during his travels through Italy in the mid-1920s. Yoshida had depicted Venice in oil paint years before he attempted the subject in woodblock, and his deep familiarity with the city's unique combination of water, stone, and reflected light gave his prints an intimacy that distinguishes them from mere tourist documentation. The evening light on the Grand Canal or the smaller rio of Venice's interior neighborhoods was a subject that demanded everything his training in both Western oil painting and Japanese woodblock could provide.