The Mexican Prints Helen Hyde Made While Dying

Helen Hyde was an American printmaker who spent the better part of fifteen years living in Japan mastering the traditional woodblock printing techniques she had first encountered as a student in Paris. By the time she left Tokyo in 1914, she had signed an estimated 16,000 prints and built a reputation on both continents. None of that is why she ended up in Mexico.

While most people recuperate from cancer surgery by reclining on a soft pillow laying on a bed, Helen Hyde did the opposite. The American printmaker spent her 1911 recovery in Mexico, drawing everything she saw.

In 1911, Hyde had her sketchbook and her watercolors. And she had a country that looked nothing like Japan, the place she had called home for over a decade, yet somehow offered her the same quality of light, human texture, and visual material she had spent her career chasing. Having found restored health and new inspiration during that extended stay, Hyde continued to seek out warmer climates and new subject matter. Mexico was not a detour. It became a second body of work.

While in Mexico, she remained active creating drawings and watercolors that served as the basis for prints when she returned to Japan in 1912. That logistical detail matters more than it sounds. Hyde was not making prints on location. She was absorbing everything around her through sketches and watercolors, then carrying those images back to Tokyo, where professional carvers and printers translated them into the woodblock format she had mastered over the previous decade. The craftsmanship was Japanese. The subject matter was entirely Mexican.

The work she produced from that year reflects that tension in the best possible way. "Mt. Orizaba from Jalapa" was based on sketches Hyde made while visiting a health resort at Jalapa on the east coast of Mexico. The mountain depicted is Pico de Orizaba, an inactive volcano with a snow-covered cone that bears a striking resemblance to Mount Fuji. Hyde almost certainly noticed that resemblance on purpose. Although the subject is not Japanese, the composition is deliberately reminiscent of 19th-century Japanese landscape prints, and it remains her only true landscape print in a career otherwise dominated by figures. She spent over ten years in Japan and reserved the landscape format for a Mexican volcano. That choice says something.

"A Mexican Coquette," also dated 1912, depicts a young woman in a garden picking flowers while a group of young men watches from a distance. Hyde adds a black cat to the composition, and the men's black hats echo the feline's silhouette. The purple foliage partially covering the wall separates the woman from her admirers, adding tension while accentuating her beauty. It is a playful image, but the compositional control behind it is precise. The cat is not decorative. It is doing the same thing the young woman is doing: watching, unbothered, while being watched.

"Going to Market" features a young Mexican woman riding a donkey with two baskets beside her, a man in a sombrero walking alongside them in the rain, their reflection visible in a lake below. Hyde described the scene as calling to mind the Biblical flight into Egypt. That association is interesting coming from an artist who spent her most formative professional years surrounded by Buddhist and Shinto imagery. She arrived in Mexico carrying a visual vocabulary built entirely in Japan and found, in an ordinary roadside scene, something ancient and universal.

With few exceptions, Hyde confined her entire body of work to Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican subjects, with particular emphasis on women and children. That self-imposed focus was not accidental. Hyde was not an artist who wandered.

Jalapa is a small city on the eastern slope of the Sierra Madre. In 1911 it had a health resort, a view of Pico de Orizaba, and an American woman with a sketchbook who had maybe four years left to live. The mountain is still there. So are the prints.

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