Garden Tenryu-ji, Kyoto

Date:: 1957
Medium:: Print
Edition:: Self-printed
Source:: Victoria and Albert Museum

Typical Price

Rare early Saito Kyoto garden scene in excellent condition: $5,000–$15,000
Fine mid-century garden or temple print: $1,500–$5,000
Standard edition, good condition: $500–$1,500

Description

Tenryu-ji in Arashiyama is one of Kyoto's great Zen gardens, its dry landscape attributed to Muso Soseki and arranged to draw the eye from raked gravel through shaped stone to borrowed mountain scenery beyond. Saito renders this layered recession not with perspective but with flat bands of color—gravel white, moss green, dark cedar—stacked like the planes of a Mondrian grid made living. The 1957 date places this among his earliest serious Kyoto garden prints, works that would absorb him for decades.