Nikko Gateway

Dated 1928 and held by the San Diego Museum of Art (accession 2008.73), Nikko Gateway is one of the principal large vertical color woodcuts of Miller's mature period and represents her engagement with the most famous architectural sequence in Japanese religious art: the Yōmeimon and surrounding gates of the Tōshōgū shrine complex at Nikkō, dedicated to Tokugawa Ieyasu and consecrated in 1617. The tall format (approximately 36 by 24 cm) lets Miller frame the great cinnabar-and-gilt gateway against a slatey winter sky, with cryptomeria trunks pressing in at the margins and a small cluster of pilgrim figures at the threshold giving scale. The print is one of the suite of 1928 plates that Miller exhibited on her 1929-1930 American demonstration tour, in the same group as Rain Blossoms and A Korean Shrine, and the careful, almost archaeological precision with which the lacquered carvings of the gate are recorded reflects the eight months of preparatory sketching that she spent at Nikkō in 1927-1928. The San Diego impression was bequeathed to the museum in 2008 and is the standard reference for the print in American collections.