Nunnery's Garden (A) -- Kyoto Series No. 46, Shôwa period, dated 1975

Nunnery's Garden (A), numbered 46 in Takahashi Rikio's long-running Kyoto Series, is a 1975 woodblock print that distills one of the city's secluded temple gardens into a meditation on tone, edge, and weathered surface. A leading second-generation figure in the sosaku-hanga movement, Takahashi Rikio devoted much of his career to a personal cartography of Kyoto, translating its temples, walls, gates, and gravel courtyards into a Kyoto abstraction that prizes mood over architectural likeness. The composition is built from broad, quietly toned planes rather than line, with the garden's geometry reduced to a few balanced rectangles and bands. Modulated inking gives the surface a stained, plaster-like depth, evoking the patina of an old earthen wall as much as the swept gravel and clipped foliage that define a nunnery's enclosed precinct. The work belongs to a series in which Takahashi returned again and again to the same kinds of subject so that each iteration became less a depiction and more a refinement, sosaku-hanga in its most reflective register. True to the movement's principle of jiga, jikoku, jizuri, Takahashi designed, carved, and printed the block himself, and the slightly irregular registration and granular pigment laid over the kozo paper read as deliberate evidence of that hand. The print is recorded in the collection at Harvard Art Museums, where it documents the sustained dialogue between Kyoto's monastic architecture and a postwar printmaker who saw abstraction not as a break from tradition but as a way of listening more closely to it. As number 46 in the Kyoto Series, Nunnery's Garden (A) underscores how Takahashi Rikio used serial practice to honor a single city as both physical place and inner landscape.