Fish Scow

Fish Scow, etched by Thomas Handforth in 1928, belongs to the artist's small group of maritime subjects from the late 1920s and brings his observational manner to bear on the unglamorous working life of a flat-bottomed fishing barge. The composition is built around the broad, low silhouette of the scow itself, with rigging, nets, and figures of fishermen indicated through a relatively economical etched line. The print's interest is partly technical — Handforth's handling of water, reflected light, and the wooden hull all draw on the same intaglio tradition of marine etching exemplified by Joseph Pennell, with whom Handforth had studied at the Art Students League of New York — and partly observational, as the artist places the workaday vessel at the centre of the sheet rather than relegating it to background atmosphere. The print belongs to the consistent body of 1928 etchings on cream laid paper that the Art Institute of Chicago acquired through Mrs. Merle Shera (https://www.artic.edu/artworks/70348), and shares with the Mexican and North African sheets a loose, slightly knotted handling of line that defines Handforth's mature etched manner. For students of Thomas Handforth, Fish Scow is a useful demonstration of the breadth of his subject-matter in the years before his Guggenheim-funded departure for China, and of how the Pacific Northwest maritime environment of his Tacoma upbringing continued to surface in his prints even after his long expatriate years had begun.