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 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.