Day Dreams

Day Dreams of 1901 illustrates Helen Hyde's deepening engagement with the [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) genre as practiced in Meiji-period Tokyo and her ability to depict introspective moments with unhurried attention. The print shows a young woman in a contemplative pose, the subject matter recalling the dreaming bijin of Kitagawa Utamaro and the moody late-nineteenth-century bijin-ga of Toyohara Kunichika, but rendered in the calmer palette and gentler line characteristic of Hyde's emerging style. As an American Japonisme artist working in Tokyo from 1899 and a [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) precursor whose workshop practice preceded Watanabe Shozaburo's 1915 formal launch of the shin-hanga movement by fourteen years, Hyde had by this date settled into a productive collaboration with Japanese carvers and printers in the traditional [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) workshop system. Her training with Kano Tomonobu had introduced her to Japanese figure painting conventions, and her access to Tokyo workshop printers ensured authentic multi-block color execution rather than the Western etching she had practiced earlier. Held by the Art Institute of Chicago, which preserves the most important institutional collection of Hyde's work, Day Dreams reflects Mary Cassatt's influence in its private, interior subject, but the means of production are entirely Japanese. The print belongs to the body of bijin-ga that Hyde produced for American collectors and exhibition audiences during the height of the American Japonisme craze, and it anticipates the more atmospheric introspective bijin-ga that Hashiguchi Goyo and Ito Shinsui would produce within the shin-hanga movement during the 1910s and 1920s.