The Forge

The Forge, etched by Thomas Handforth in 1928, is one of the artist's most directly observed working-life subjects from his pre-China years and shares the close, almost reportorial attention to manual trade that runs through the larger body of his interwar prints. The composition centres on a forge interior, with the figure of the smith bent over his work and the heated metal at the heart of the image; surrounding details — bellows, tools, the dark heavy structure of the forge itself — are built up through dense, deliberate etched line and crosshatching that recall both the European intaglio tradition Handforth had absorbed in Paris and the contemporary American interest in industrial and craft labour as a serious print subject. The print belongs to the same 1928 group as Peking Camels, Leda, Casablanca Fort, and Pulque y Tortilla, and shares with them the loose, slightly knotted handling of line that defines Handforth's mature etched manner. The Art Institute of Chicago holds this impression in its modern American prints collection (https://www.artic.edu/artworks/70349) and documents it as part of the consistent body of Handforth material acquired through Mrs. Merle Shera. For students of Thomas Handforth, The Forge is useful as one of the few prints in his catalogue that engages straightforwardly with traditional Western craft labour rather than with the explicitly travel-derived subjects (North African markets, Mexican villages, Peking camels) that dominated his output, and as evidence of his ability to bring the same observational seriousness to a workshop interior that he later brought to the courtyards and street trades of pre-war China.