Stone garden of Ryoan-ji Temple

The subject is the karesansui (dry landscape) garden at Ryōan-ji in northwestern Kyoto, whose fifteen rocks are arranged in five groupings on a rectangular bed of raked white gravel enclosed by an earthen wall. Translating this composition into mokuhanga presents a particular challenge: the print must register the parallel raked lines of the gravel and the rounded mass of each stone using a limited number of blocks. The contrast typically depends on a key block for the rock outlines and tonal blocks of grey or pale beige for the gravel field, with bokashi gradations sometimes used along the wall to suggest weathered plaster and tile. As one of the most reproduced Zen subjects in postwar Japanese printmaking, Ryōan-ji recurs across the work of many sōsaku-hanga artists; Nakagawa Isaku's treatment fits a broader twentieth-century tendency to render famous temple sites with restrained palettes and emphasis on flat planar geometry.