Easter Greetings

Easter Greetings, an undated etching and drypoint by Thomas Handforth held at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, belongs to the artist's small but coherent group of religious and seasonal cards from the 1920s and 1930s, in which he applied his etched and lithographic vocabulary to the kind of personal print exchange that printmakers of the period commonly produced for friends, dealers, and patrons. The composition draws on traditional Christian Easter iconography — the Crucifixion, a sleeping soldier, a celestial sun, and a male figure in a landscape — but Handforth's handling is loose and observational rather than devotional, with the figures and the surrounding landscape built from a small number of decisive etched strokes supplemented by the velvety dark of drypoint burr. The print is intimate in scale, measuring only about four and a half by two and a half inches, and was clearly conceived as a private greeting rather than a publishable composition. The Smithsonian American Art Museum holds this impression under accession number 1970.132, acquired through the gift of Sade C. Styron (https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/easter-greetings-9908), and provides open access through the Smithsonian's Open Access programme. For students of Thomas Handforth, Easter Greetings is a useful demonstration of the breadth of his print practice — alongside the major etched subjects, the small religious and seasonal cards form a distinctive and personal strand of his output — and of his willingness to absorb Western religious iconography into his characteristic graphic language.