Sfax

Sfax (Whitney impression), an undated etching by Thomas Handforth held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, complements the related Sfax, Tunis sheet at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and gives a clear picture of how Handforth's North African subjects circulated through the American print market in the years after he made them. The composition is set, like the Smithsonian sheet, in the Tunisian port city of Sfax; the Whitney's catalogue describes the scene as 'people gather around a horse-drawn carriage and outdoor cafe beneath tall palm trees,' a vignette characteristic of the artist's observational handling of North African daily life in the mid-1920s. The etched line is loose and confident; the figures and the architecture are built from a small number of decisive strokes, while the palm trees and surrounding ground are handled in looser hatching that conveys the bright, slightly hazy quality of the southern Tunisian coast. The print is recorded under Whitney accession number 31.684 (https://whitney.org/collection/works/4314), acquired through museum purchase, and is one of two Handforth works in the Whitney's collection alongside the Leda of c. 1929. For students of Thomas Handforth, the Whitney Sfax is a useful counterpart to the related Smithsonian impression: the two together demonstrate how the same composition entered multiple major American collections and how Handforth's North African subjects continued to circulate through American print connoisseurship in the decades after they were made.