Leda

Leda, etched by Thomas Handforth in 1928, is one of the artist's relatively rare excursions into classical mythology and a useful counterweight to the predominantly observational, travel-derived character of his other prints from the same period. The subject — Leda watching the swans of Zeus across a wooded pond, in this case accompanied by a third bird that brings a faintly comic, naturalistic register to the otherwise loaded scene — is a recurring motif in European printmaking from the Renaissance forward, and Handforth's treatment makes no attempt to outdo Michelangelo or his more notorious early sixteenth-century followers. Instead he reduces the encounter to a quiet woodland tableau, with the young woman shown small, standing among slender trees at the left of the sheet while the swans and duck cross the water of the pond. The etched line is loose and unforced; the print's authority comes from its handling of the trees and reflected light rather than from any erotic charge. Both the Art Institute of Chicago (https://www.artic.edu/artworks/70343) and the Whitney Museum of American Art hold impressions of Leda, and the work has been reproduced in modern surveys of early twentieth-century American etching for its calm reworking of a heavily handled subject. For students of Thomas Handforth, the 1928 Leda is significant as evidence that his Paris training had given him fluent access to the European mythological repertoire even as his temperament drew him toward the contemporary streets of Sfax, Casablanca, Peking, and southern Mexico. The print stands at the seam between the academic foundation of his Beaux-Arts years and the looser, observational manner that would dominate the prints he made after 1930.