Garden in Ryuanji (Ryuanji niwa)

The garden of Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto — perhaps the world's most celebrated dry landscape garden — is Hashimoto's subject in this 1973 print, issued in an edition of fifty-six. The garden's fifteen stones, arranged in five groupings on a bed of carefully raked white gravel, presents perhaps the ultimate expression of the karesansui principle: a composition so reduced to essentials that its meaning remains perpetually open to interpretation. Hashimoto's rendering honors the garden's severe beauty through his own comparable commitment to reduction and precision.