Thomas Handforth

Thomas Scofield Handforth (1897-1948) was an American etcher, lithographer, illustrator, and children's book author whose long expatriate years in Mexico, North Africa, China, and India produced one of the most internationally inflected bodies of work in early twentieth-century American printmaking. Although he is best remembered today as the writer-illustrator of Mei Li, the 1938 picture book that won him the Caldecott Medal in 1939, his prints — etchings, drypoints, and lithographs drawn from the streets, markets, and houses of the countries he travelled — are the foundation of his artistic reputation, and impressions are held by major American museums including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, the Portland Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Spencer Museum of Art, and the Clark Art Institute. They are also represented in the Minneapolis Institute of Art and a number of regional collections of American prints from the 1920s and 1930s.

Handforth was born in Tacoma, Washington, on September 16, 1897, the son of a prosperous Pacific Northwest family, and grew up surrounded by the maritime traffic of Puget Sound and the cultural mixing of the Asian-Pacific Rim that would shape his later subject matter. He attended the University of Washington for a single year, 1915-16, before moving east to study at the Art Students League of New York under Frank Vincent DuMond, George Bridgman, and Joseph Pennell — the latter a major American etcher whose advocacy of artistic etching as a serious print medium helped establish the framework in which Handforth would later work. He also studied at the National Academy of Design in New York. His training was interrupted by service in the First World War, and after the armistice he travelled to Paris on the prevailing wave of American artists drawn to postwar Europe, studying at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Colarossi between 1920 and 1922. The Paris years gave him exposure to French printmaking and to the wider European appetite for travel imagery that would feed his subsequent itinerant practice.

For the better part of the next two decades Handforth lived almost continuously outside the United States. He worked in Morocco and Tunisia in the early 1920s, producing the streetscapes, markets, and Arab figural subjects from which his Sfax and Casablanca etchings are drawn. He spent time in southern Mexico in the late 1920s, where his rich Tierra Caliente, Pulque y Tortilla, Benito, and Bride Francesca prints established him among American interpreters of Mexican daily life in the era of Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and the wider Mexican mural and printmaking renaissance. He travelled in India, particularly Kashmir, in the late 1920s, and in 1930 was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship that funded his first journey to China. He settled in Peking (Beijing) in 1931 and remained based there, with intermittent travel, until 1936; an extended return to India followed before the worsening international situation drew him back to the United States in the late 1930s. The Peking years produced his best-known print subjects — camel caravans on the city's outskirts, market porters, courtyards, and the wider cast of Chinese street figures whose direct observation was, for him, the central justification of the long expatriate years.

His etchings and drypoints from this period are characterised by vigorous, sometimes deliberately rough line work; an interest in single figural protagonists set within sketchily indicated environments; and a willingness to apply Western academic drawing to non-Western subjects without the picturesque flattening typical of much earlier travel imagery. He was a member of the Chicago Society of Etchers and the Brooklyn Society of Etchers, the two leading American print societies of the interwar decades, and his prints were regularly exhibited in their annuals, where they were favourably received alongside work by John Marin, John Sloan, Childe Hassam, and the younger generation of American etchers. He was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design in 1936 and a full Academician in 1944.

It was in the closing years of his Chinese residence that Handforth conceived Mei Li, the picture book based on a Chinese girl he had observed in Peking. He completed the lithographic illustrations and final text after returning to the United States, and the book was published by Doubleday in 1938. In 1939 the American Library Association awarded the Caldecott Medal, then only in its second year, to Mei Li, recognising the book as the most distinguished American picture book for children of the previous year. The award transformed his public reputation overnight, and Mei Li remains one of the best-known and most studied early Caldecott winners; its frank, observed Chinese subject matter and its handling of an East Asian protagonist in a major American children's book have been the subject of significant later scholarship.

He followed Mei Li with a number of book and magazine illustration projects and continued to make prints, though his pace slowed in the 1940s as he confronted serious ill health. He had moved to Los Angeles by the mid-1940s, and he died there of cancer on October 19, 1948, at the age of fifty-one. He never married, and the bulk of his personal papers, prints, and drawings were eventually distributed to museums and to the Tacoma Public Library, which today maintains the substantial Thomas S. Handforth Digital Image Archive of more than three hundred drawings, prints, paintings, and letters.

For the purposes of a Japanese prints collection, Handforth occupies an unusual but pertinent position. He was not himself a Japanese artist or a sōsaku-hanga practitioner, but his career was shaped throughout by direct engagement with East Asia — Peking in particular — and by the same long Western interest in Chinese and Japanese printmaking traditions that produced the American shin-hanga audience and the printmakers who followed him to Asia in the 1950s, including Helen Hyde, Bertha Lum, and the slightly younger Paul Jacoulet. His etchings of Peking camels, markets, and street figures are among the most accomplished American printed images of pre-war China and stand as a useful counterpart to the better-known Japanese print tradition: an outsider's, etched and lithographed account of life in the East Asian capitals during the same decades in which Japanese woodblock artists were continuing their own twentieth-century renewal of the medium. His inclusion in collections built around East Asian printmaking is therefore historically apt, even though his technical line runs from European intaglio rather than from Japanese woodblock.