Tenryuji Garden (Tenryuji teien)

Created in 1953, Tenryuji Garden (Tenryuji teien) is a color woodblock print depicting the famous Zen temple garden in Arashiyama, Kyoto. Tenryuji, founded in 1339, contains one of Japan's oldest surviving landscape gardens, designed by the Zen master Muso Soseki. The garden centers on a pond that borrows the backdrop of Mount Arashiyama to create a composition that integrates cultivated and wild nature. Chizuko Yoshida's woodblock rendering of this garden reflects her early career interest in specific Japanese places before she moved toward pure abstraction. The color woodblock medium suits the garden's layered composition of water, stone, vegetation, and borrowed landscape, each element translatable into a distinct block and ink color. The 1953 date places this among Chizuko's earliest mature prints.