Leda (Whitney impression)

Leda (Whitney impression), an etching dated about 1929 by Thomas Handforth held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, is a slightly later impression of the same Leda subject for which the Art Institute of Chicago holds a 1928 impression, and gives a useful sense of how the print circulated through American collections in the years immediately after Handforth made it. The composition is unchanged from the Chicago impression: a young woman stands by trees watching two swans and an additional duck near a wooded pond, in a quiet reworking of the classical Leda mythology that puts the natural setting at least as much in focus as the implied erotic encounter. The Whitney sheet is a 60-edition impression, measuring eleven and a quarter by fifteen and one-eighth inches overall with a plate size of eight by ten and nine-sixteenths inches, recorded under accession number 96.68.147 (https://whitney.org/collection/works/10651) and acquired through the Lauder Foundation's Leonard and Evelyn Lauder Fund. For students of Thomas Handforth, the Whitney Leda is a particularly clean demonstration of how American museums of the late twentieth century continued to add interwar American etchings of this kind to their collections, and a useful companion to the related Chicago impression: the two sheets together establish Leda as one of Handforth's most widely circulated mythological subjects and one of the most clearly documented prints in his interwar catalogue.