Niwa No. 19

Niwa means garden, and this print belongs to a numbered series in which Hashimoto explored the formal vocabulary of Japanese garden design. Throughout his career he returned repeatedly to gardens — both the dry karesansui of Zen temples and the stroll gardens of feudal estates — finding in their composed arrangements of stone, gravel, moss, and water a subject suited to his structural eye. Number 19 in such a sequence indicates a sustained project, allowing Hashimoto to study seasonal variation, viewpoint changes, and the relation between architectural elements (lanterns, pavilions, tsukubai water basins) and planted material. His treatment typically reduces the garden to flat color planes, the stones rendered as dark masses set against raked gravel or moss, with carved keylines defining edges rather than describing texture. The work exemplifies the sosaku-hanga commitment to the artist's own hand at every stage of production, from block cutting to printing on washi with a baren.