Stone garden

The numerical suffix marks this as the third in Hashimoto's stone garden series, his sustained engagement with the karesansui dry landscape gardens of Kyoto temples -- Ryoan-ji being the most famous example, though he also depicted gardens at Daitoku-ji and other Zen complexes. The print likely renders raked gravel as broad flat fields, punctuated by the dark masses of standing stones and the dark line of a clay-and-tile wall behind. Such compositions reduce the garden to a near-abstract arrangement of horizontal bands and isolated forms, a subject well-suited to the sosaku-hanga emphasis on personal expression through simplified design. Bokashi would soften the gravel field and articulate the wall's tile coping, while the keyblock supplies the firm contour of stones and architectural framing. Hashimoto's stone garden series, alongside his castles, became among his most collected works internationally during the 1960s and 1970s, valued by Western audiences as accessible expressions of Zen aesthetic principles.