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Mermaids, Centaurs, and Cool Summer Streams

What could be better than a chilly splash in the summer? (Fantasy creatures optional!)

David Humphrey, maker of today's print, was one of several monotype artists associated with the Silvermine art colony near Darien, Connecticut. He won local renown for his color monotypes, which he made over several decades from approximately 1912 through the 1930s.

A published description of his monotypes in 1931 applies to this monotype as well: "misty, gray-green trees; graceful figures in diaphanous robes, drifting languidly through exquisite flower-spangled meadows of shadow-haunted forests; fascinating satyrs, leering behind gray lichen-draped rocks—a world poetic in its conception."

To view more prints, see our online show Singular Impressions: The Monotype in America.

Source: Joann Moser. Singular Impressions: The Monotype in America (Washington, D.C. and London: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1997).

Pictured: David W. Humphrey, 1872–1950, The Rivals, about 1900, monotype on paper, 10 3/8 x 12 1/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase.