Kinkakuji seen in Falling Snow

This Metropolitan Museum of Art miniature print by Hasegawa Sadanobu I portrays Kyoto's celebrated Kinkakuji — the Temple of the Golden Pavilion — under a soft snowfall, one of the most iconic seasonal pairings in Japanese visual culture. The Golden Pavilion, a fourteenth-century Ashikaga-era retirement villa converted into a Zen temple, had been a tourist destination and pilgrimage site for centuries when Sadanobu produced this miniature view in the 1840s or 1850s. The composition deploys the conventions of Kyoto landscape printing — the rooflines of the multi-tiered pavilion reflected in the surrounding pond, the surrounding garden enclosed by snow-laden pines — while the small format compresses the image into the size of a souvenir or postcard suitable for travelers returning from the old capital. Sadanobu's printers employed precise color registration to maintain the architectural detail at miniature scale, and the snow effect uses [karazuri](/glossary/karazuri) (blind embossing) and white pigment to give tactile relief to the falling flakes. JP1405 in the Met collection preserves an example of Sadanobu's mature miniature production.