Woman of Brittany

This 1920 woodblock print portrays a woman from the Brittany region of France, a subject Yamamoto first encountered during his years living and working in the French countryside. Breton women were a favorite subject of European artists from Gauguin onward, their distinctive headdresses and traditional clothing offering strong visual motifs. Yamamoto approaches the subject without the exoticizing gaze of his European predecessors, instead rendering the woman with the same observational directness he applied to his Japanese, Chinese, and Russian subjects. The woodblock technique treats her costume's starched white coiffe and dark garments as contrasting tonal areas, and the carving captures the weight of the fabric and the solidity of the figure beneath it. The print extends Yamamoto's cross-cultural portrait practice into the heart of Western Europe.