Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia

Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia is a color woodblock print by Toshi Yoshida depicting the iconic Atlantic Canadian fishing village known for its granite headlands and white-and-red lighthouse perched above the surf. Toshi Yoshida traveled and exhibited widely outside Japan throughout his career, and his international subjects, from the American Southwest to East Africa to the Canadian Maritimes, formed a substantial parallel body of work to the Japanese landscapes for which the Yoshida studio was best known. Peggy's Cove translates a quintessentially North Atlantic scene into the disciplined vocabulary of Japanese woodblock printing: the worn texture of bare rock, the cold light reflecting off the cove, and the silhouettes of fishing structures are built up from successive blocks and water-based pigments in the same handcraft tradition Toshi Yoshida inherited from his father Hiroshi Yoshida. Although Toshi Yoshida came out of the shin-hanga workshop model, his foreign-subject prints align closely with the values of the sosaku-hanga creative print movement, in which the artist's personal engagement with place and process is foregrounded. This impression is documented through ukiyo-e.org via the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria's collection, where it sits among other Yoshida studio works that illustrate how Japanese woodblock printing could carry distant, unfamiliar landscapes back to Japanese viewers, and bring Japanese craft technique to international audiences.