In the Rain

In the Rain, dated 1898, is among Helen Hyde's earliest fully realized woodblock prints and was produced shortly before her permanent relocation to Tokyo in 1899. By this date she had completed her European training under Felix Regamey in Paris and had begun the deliberate study of Japanese print technique that would define her career. The subject, a figure walking through rain, belongs to a tradition Hyde knew well from the rain prints of Utagawa Hiroshige and the night-rain compositions of Kobayashi Kiyochika, both of whom treated the diagonal pattern of falling rain as a graphic device that flattens space. Her American Japonisme is announced in this transposition; rather than illustrating an Asian subject in Western technique, Hyde set out to learn the Japanese woodblock idiom itself, a path that would lead to her becoming a shin-hanga precursor through fifteen years of subsequent collaboration with Japanese carvers and printers in the traditional ukiyo-e workshop system. Held by the Art Institute of Chicago, which preserves the most significant institutional collection of Hyde's prints, In the Rain demonstrates the technical confidence she possessed before even arriving in Tokyo. Within a year of completing this print she would begin formal study with Kano Tomonobu and commission carvers and printers to execute her designs through authentic multi-block color techniques. The print also documents the moment American Japonisme moved from decorative borrowing toward authentic technical engagement, the same trajectory that would soon allow Watanabe Shozaburo to formalize the shin-hanga movement around 1915, two decades after this work was first printed.