The Sauce-Pan Shop

The Sauce-Pan Shop is Helen Hyde's view of the modest riverside front of a shop selling cooking pans in Suzhou, China. The cropped roof, walls, windows, doorway, and layered stone foundation of the building above the rippled surface of the river water are presented as a frieze of flat rectangles of varying textures and muted colors. Their stark geometry is relieved by the black curvilinear forms of the Chinese characters emblazoned on the white wall and the amorphous watery tones of the river in which they are vaguely reflected. The composition is further animated by three small figures: a man about to fill a bright-red water container from his position on a stairway at the river's edge, and a woman and child who observe him from the open doorway of the shop.

Along with Moon Bridge at Kameido (TF 1996.25), Moonlight on the Viga Canal (TF 1996.26), and The Bath (TF 1996.24), The Sauce-Pan Shop was made during Hyde's long residence in Japan, between 1899 and 1914. During those years, she studied and perfected her technique in traditional Japanese woodcut printmaking. She used her prints to picture aspects of traditional Japanese life and arts, but she also made images of Chinese subjects. In addition to occasional visits back to America, Hyde took advantage of her proximity to China to visit it several times. Her 1907 trip there probably inspired this print, based on a sketch she made of a shop's bold calligraphic signage, which she finished back in Japan. Thoroughly Asian in its subject and its technique, The Sauce-Pan Shop also clearly reflects the influence of cosmopolitan American artist James McNeill Whistler. While Hyde may have learned first-hand from Japanese prints the compositional strategies that Whistler is largely credited with transmitting to western artists, such as asymmetrical arrangement and cropping of forms, this print clearly recalls his widely admired paintings and prints of modest English, Dutch, and Venetian shopfronts and waterside spots, such as Fish-Shop, Venice (TF 1992.151) and Carlyle's Sweetstuff Shop (TF 1992.147). This print was among those Hyde exhibited at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.

(Re)Presenting Women, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, October 16, 2001–January 13, 2002.

Le Japonisme en Amérique: oeuvres sur papier, 1880–1930 (Japonisme in America: Works on Paper, 1880–1930), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France (organizer). Venue: Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France, September 15–November 30, 2002.

The Orient Expressed: Japan's Influence on Western Art, 1854–1918, Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, Mississippi (organizer). Venues: Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, Mississippi, February 19–July 17, 2011; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas, October 5, 2011–January 15, 2012. [exh. cat.] (exhibited in Mississippi only)

Mason, Tim and Lynn Mason. Helen Hyde. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. No. 79, p. 109; ill. p. 48.

Weisberg, Gabriel P. et al. The Orient Expressed: Japan's Influence on Western Art, 1854–1918. (exh. cat., Mississippi Museum of Art). Jackson, Mississippi: Mississippi Museum of Art, 2011. Text cat. no. 109, p. 178; ill. fig. 117 (color).