A Summer Shower

A Summer Shower, dated 1909, returns Helen Hyde to one of her most fertile subjects, the figure caught in rain, treated here in the saturated heat of a Japanese summer. The print depicts figures in summer kimono shielding themselves against a sudden downpour, the diagonal lines of rain creating the graphic flattening that Japanese printmakers had perfected from the Edo period onward. As a [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) precursor working six years before Watanabe Shozaburo's 1915 establishment of the shin-hanga movement, Hyde had been collaborating with Japanese carvers and printers in the traditional [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) workshop system for a decade. Her American Japonisme is visible in the direct inheritance from Utagawa Hiroshige's rain prints, particularly his Sudden Shower over Shin-Ohashi Bridge from the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. The compression of figures, the diagonal rain pattern, and the moisture-darkened color all echo Hiroshige's compositional grammar. Mary Cassatt's intimate compositions of women provided a Western counterpart, but the print is executed entirely in authentic Japanese woodblock technique with hand-burnished color and complex registration. Held by the Art Institute of Chicago, which preserves the most important institutional collection of Hyde's work, A Summer Shower belongs to the height of her productive Tokyo period and reflects the technical confidence she had attained under her teacher Kano Tomonobu and her studio carver Murata. The print also points forward to the rain-and-snow atmospheric prints that would define Kawase Hasui's shin-hanga production in the 1920s, evidence of Hyde's position as a transitional figure between Edo ukiyo-e and twentieth-century shin-hanga.