Woman in Bagdad

Woman in Bagdad is a 1954 color woodblock print depicting a female figure in the Iraqi capital, one of several portraits Yoshida made of women in the Middle Eastern cities he visited that year. The composition connects to the Japanese bijin-ga tradition of "beautiful women" prints while extending that tradition to subjects encountered across the world, Yoshida treating the Iraqi woman with the same careful observational attention he brought to wildlife subjects and Japanese landscapes. The 1954 date places this among the earliest of his Middle Eastern prints, a record of a Baghdad that no longer exists in the same form.