The Red Curtain 1907

Helen Hyde made this print, called "The Red Curtain," in 1907. It’s like, she probably started with a block of wood, right? And then she carved away at it to make this image of a child standing in front of… well, a red curtain! I can just imagine her, carefully chipping away at the wood, trying to capture the folds of the fabric and the soft curves of the kid's face. The black calligraphy hovers around the child like a kind of… protection? The colors are so muted, you know? Like faded memories. I wonder if she was thinking about her own childhood, or maybe just trying to capture a fleeting moment in time? It's all about simplification, paring down to the bare essentials. The texture of the paper, the way the ink sits on the surface – it all adds to the feeling. It reminds me of other women artists working with printmaking like, oh, Mary Cassatt, or even some of the ukiyo-e artists from Japan. There is something so intimate, so human about it.