Gillette, Edwin F.

Biographical Information

Helen Hyde was born in Lima, N.Y. and spent her girlhood in San Francisco. As a young woman, she lived in France, Germany and Japan, either studying art or as a practicing artist. She died in Pasadena, Calif., in 1919 and is buried at Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, Calif.

During her early years as an artist, Hyde maintained a studio in the home of her “Aunt Gussie” at 2845 Pierce, on the corner of Pierce and Union Streets. She was a member of a prosperous and talented family. Her grandfather, Oliver Hyde, Jr. (1814-1901) was a self-taught engineer who traveled overland to California in 1852 and settled in Benicia. He established the first foundry in the Territory of Nevada. His son, William Birelie Hyde, married Marietta Butler of Lima, N.Y. and later settled in California, where he worked as an engineer during the years 1870-1880. He died in Idaho at the age of 40, when Helen was 13 years old. Following his death, his sister Augusta Hyde Storer Bixler (“Aunt Gussie”) helped to keep the Hyde family together and financed Hyde’s interest in art. Mrs. Bixler accompanied Hyde to New York, where she began her first formal study at the Art Students’ League.

Hyde continued her studies in Berlin under Skarbina; in Paris under Raphael Collins and Albert Sterner; and in Japan under Kano Tomonoki, a master of brush painting. With the exception of a print of the Golden Gate Bridge made from her Pierce St. studio, Hyde confined her work to Chinese, Japanese and Mexican subjects, with particular emphasis on women and children. She worked in many media, including etchings, woodcuts, aquatints, oils, watercolors, and pastels. Hyde’s application of color to woodcuts and etchings attracted attention and enhanced her reputation. Etched prints were limited to runs of 100, each printed, signed and numbered by the artist.

The letters which Hyde sent home from Japan during the Russo-Japanese War were also printed in the San Francisco Argonaut. In collaboration with her sister Mable Hyde Gillette, she wrote and illustrated a child’s nonsense book patterned after Lewis Carroll’s work. It was published in San Francisco by A. M. Robertson but was lost in the fire that followed the earthquake of 1906. She illustrated another book, Moon Babies, with verses by G. Orr Clark, as well as Jingles from Japan, with verses by Mabel Hyde Gillette.

Nearly complete sets of Hyde’s work can be found in the California State Library, the Carnegie Library in Pittsburg, PA, and the Library of Congress. There are also collections in the New York Public Library, the Chicago Art Institute, and the University of Oregon.

From the guide to the Helen Hyde papers, 1881-1953, (California Historical Society)