Entrance to the temple

An untitled or generically titled "entrance to the temple" composition in Ido's catalogue almost always frames a sanmon or chumon gate from low and head-on, with stone paving leading the eye into a darker interior beyond. Kyoto offers dozens of candidates — the massive Chion-in sanmon, the Karamon at Daitokuji, the smaller covered gates of Tofukuji's sub-temples — and Ido's recurring practice was to flatten the timber framework into broad planes of color and let a single seasonal element (a maple branch, a cluster of azalea, a band of snow on the tiled roof) carry the temporal information. The print depends on the keyblock to articulate the bracket complexes (tokyo) and tiled ridge, while [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) at the threshold creates the recession into shadow that the eye reads as enclosure. Within his four-seasons Kyoto cycle this subject is structural rather than scenic: the gate is the threshold across which the visitor passes from the city grid into the temple precinct, and Ido returned to it repeatedly as a compositional armature.