Hall of the Great Buddha (Nara Daibutsuden)

Hall of the Great Buddha at Nara (Nara Daibutsuden), published in 1950, depicts the Todai-ji's Great Buddha Hall (Daibutsuden) — the largest wooden building in the world, housing the 15-meter bronze Buddha cast in the eighth century — in a postwar composition that reasserts the ancient monument's continued grandeur. The Great Buddha Hall, its massive gabled roof rising above Nara's deer park, was a subject demanding compositional care to convey the scale of the structure relative to its natural surroundings. The 1950 date, five years after the war's end, gives this depiction of Japan's most monumental ancient structure a particular cultural resonance.