Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden

This mokuhanga depicts Shinjuku Gyoen, the expansive Tokyo garden originally laid out as imperial grounds and opened to the public in 1949. Onchi approaches the subject with the simplified, flattened sensibility characteristic of his [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) work, treating foliage, paths, and spatial recession as interlocking color fields rather than topographically accurate description. The print likely employs broad areas of green and earth tones with carefully registered hand-printed key blocks, the grain of the woodblock often left visible as a textural element. While Onchi is best known for his abstract Lyrique and Poem series, he produced occasional landscapes that filtered observed places through his modernist vocabulary. Unlike the [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) tradition of Hokusai or Hiroshige, which prioritized topographic recognition, Onchi's garden views compress space and reduce incident, aligning the work more closely with early-twentieth-century European landscape modernism than with classical [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e). As a self-carved, self-printed work it embodies the founding principle of sosaku-hanga: the artist as sole author of the print from drawing through impression.