Rodeo

Rodeo, etched by Thomas Handforth in 1930, marks the artist's brief but vivid encounter with the rural Western United States in the years immediately before he departed for China on his Guggenheim Fellowship. The composition catches the moment of a rider mounted on a bucking bronco at the centre of a rodeo arena, with the supporting crowd and the wider stockyard setting indicated through looser line and softer hatching. Handforth's etched handling is unforced and quick: the central animal-and-rider group is built from a small number of strong contour lines and a tight cluster of internal hatching that conveys the muscular contortion of the bucking horse, while the surrounding ground is left comparatively open. The print belongs to the small group of Handforth etchings that engage directly with American subject matter; rather than the North African, Mexican, or Chinese settings that dominate his catalogue, Rodeo locates him for a moment within the broader 1930s American interest in regional, rural, and Western subject matter that fed both the wider WPA print programmes and the magazine illustration market in which Handforth was active. The Art Institute of Chicago holds this impression of Rodeo (https://www.artic.edu/artworks/70352), accessioned among its modern American prints. For collectors of interwar American etching, the 1930 Rodeo is the indispensable Handforth on a homegrown subject and a clear demonstration of the same observational economy he would shortly carry to the courtyards and camel caravans of Peking.