Black Eros

Black Eros, etched by Thomas Handforth in 1928, is among the more unusual prints in the artist's late-1920s catalogue and reflects his interest in figures who would have read at the time as exotic or marginal within the New York print circuit. The composition centres on a single Black figure handled with the same direct observational manner that Handforth applied to the Arab, Mexican, and Chinese subjects he was producing in the same year, but the print's title locates it in mythological territory and frames the figure as a personification of Eros rather than as a portrait. The handling of the etched line is rich and confident; passages of crosshatching build the darker zones of the figure and ground without falling into caricature, and the composition's vertical emphasis recalls the academic figure studies Handforth had absorbed during his Paris years. The Art Institute of Chicago, which holds this impression in its modern American prints collection (https://www.artic.edu/artworks/70350), preserves Black Eros as one of a coherent group of Handforth etchings printed on cream laid paper that the museum acquired together as a gift from Mrs. Merle Shera, and the print has been studied alongside Leda and Promenade II as evidence of how Handforth could move between observational travel work and openly mythologised compositions in the same year. For collectors of interwar American etching, Black Eros is a reminder of how broadly Handforth's interests ranged before his settled focus on China and the Peking street life that would dominate the prints of the 1930s.