The Return

The Return of 1907 takes its title from the narrative suggestion of a figure coming home, a subject that fits within Helen Hyde's preference for moments of arrival, interruption, and quiet domestic transition. The print continues her engagement with the [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) tradition, depicting a female figure in the kind of intimate moment that distinguished her work from the more public or theatrical bijin of earlier [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e). 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 eight years, Hyde had by 1907 eight years of collaboration with Japanese carvers and printers in the traditional ukiyo-e workshop system. Her training with Kano Tomonobu had grounded her in Japanese painterly conventions, while her Tokyo workshop printers ensured authentic multi-block color execution. The print descends from the bijin-ga tradition of Kitagawa Utamaro and Suzuki Harunobu, but Hyde's modern observational sensibility and her contact with Mary Cassatt's color drypoints of women in private moments give the print a contemporary quality her Edo precursors could not possess. Held by the Art Institute of Chicago, which preserves the most important institutional collection of Hyde's work, The Return belongs to the productive middle of her Tokyo career. The print's psychological intimacy and quiet domesticity anticipate the bijin-ga revival that Hashiguchi Goyo, Ito Shinsui, and later Torii Kotondo would develop within the shin-hanga movement, where the depiction of women in private domestic moments became a defining genre.