Untitled (Arab with Goats)

Untitled (Arab with Goats), an undated etching by Thomas Handforth held at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, is one of the artist's directly observed North African subjects and a clear example of his interest in the daily working life of the people among whom he travelled. The composition centres on a single male figure in the dress of pre-war North Africa, shown with goats — a domestic and pastoral occupation widely practised across the rural communities of Morocco and Tunisia where Handforth lived in the mid-1920s. The etched line is loose and confident; the figure is built from a small number of strong contour strokes, while the goats and the surrounding ground are handled with looser hatching. The print belongs to the group of North African etchings that includes Sfax, Tunis and Casablanca Fort, and shares with them the unforced, observational manner that distinguishes Handforth's interwar travel work from more picturesque or exoticising treatments of the same subjects. The Smithsonian American Art Museum holds this impression under accession number 1970.138, acquired through the gift of Sade C. Styron (https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/untitled-arab-goats-9921), and provides open access through the museum's Open Access programme. For students of Thomas Handforth, Untitled (Arab with Goats) is a useful demonstration of how consistently he applied the same observational manner across his Moroccan, Tunisian, Mexican, and Chinese subjects, and of the breadth of his ethnographic and topographic interests during the long expatriate years.