Pickaback

In Eliza Draper Gardiner's charming color print Pickaback simple shapes in pale blues and lavenders depict a girl carrying a barefoot blond toddler on her back as she walks along a beach. Her yellow bloomers peek from beneath the hem of her blue dress; her lavender leggings and feet merge with her fragmented shadow cast on the sand studded by scattered shells or pebbles. The figures of the clutching toddler and the girl, which almost fill the outlined space of the composition, are silhouetted against subtly toned horizontal bands evoking pale sky, background shoreline, and the sea, distinguished from the beach by a diagonal line.

Working in linocut or woodcut, related media that both favor the use of broad colored shapes rather than line and fine detail, Gardiner's Pickaback offers a picturesque glimpse of a moment in a tranquil summer afternoon at the beach. Gardiner's technique was well suited to capturing the glare of full sun and its effect of flattening forms and rendering shadows blue or purple. The theme of children, particularly children undertaking responsibilities like little adults, is explored in several of Gardiner's prints, as here and in her Boy and Goose (TF 1996.19). Her use of broad, simple forms and lack of outlining are reminiscent of the work of influential teacher and color printmaker Arthur Wesley Dow, whose prints and 1899 book Composition deeply influenced many printmakers of Gardiner's generation. Indeed, the cool, muted colors and deliberately flattened forms of Pickaback recall Dow's color woodcut The Purple Sky (The Long Road), Spring (TF 1995.32).