A Merry Christmas to You

A Merry Christmas to You, an etching dated 1924 by Thomas Handforth held at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, is among the earliest prints in his documented catalogue and gives an unusually clear view of his graphic manner in the years just after his return from Paris. The composition is a small-scale nativity: the infant Christ and the Virgin Mary are set within a farm stable, surrounded by cattle and sheep, in the traditional Christian Christmas iconography that the artist would also draw on in his Easter Greetings of the same general period. The etched line is precise and confident; the figures are built from a small number of decisive strokes, and the stable architecture is suggested through looser hatching that leaves the paper open to convey the cold, low-lit interior of the manger scene. At only four and three-quarters by two and a half inches, the print was clearly conceived as a personal Christmas card or holiday print exchange rather than as a publishable major composition, and it belongs to the same intimate strand of his output as the Easter Greetings. The Smithsonian American Art Museum holds this impression under accession number 1970.134, acquired through the gift of Sade C. Styron (https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/merry-christmas-you-9914), and provides open access through the museum's Open Access programme. For students of Thomas Handforth, A Merry Christmas to You is a useful early benchmark for his etched manner and a charming reminder of the personal scale at which printmakers of his generation often worked.