Town Sedan

The 'town sedan' was a body style of early- to mid-twentieth-century automobile, typically with a closed passenger compartment and an upright, formal silhouette. Dennis's print almost certainly takes one such car as its single subject, isolated against a ground of pavement, building wall, or street furniture in the manner he favoured for his vehicle portraits. His handling of the woodcut block emphasises planar simplification: the curved fenders and rounded roof of an older sedan reduce neatly to interlocking shapes that read clearly even at small scale, with grain texture from the plank surface left visible in the larger color areas. Made the same year as Trolley Bus and Traffic, Town Sedan is part of a group in which Dennis treated automobiles less as nostalgia objects than as fixed civic forms — vehicles parked along the streets of Pacific Northwest towns, observed with the same patient attention to ordinary architecture that runs through his wider practice.