The Dance, c. 1930, Woodcut print with hand-coloring, 11 1/2 x 7, signed lower right: Prescott Chaplin, This woodblock print is one of twelve total prints in Chaplin’s series of 1930, entitled Twelve Mexican Woodcuts in Color, which were originally exhibited together in bound portfolios in the United States, Mexico, and Cuba. Drawing from his observations of life in Mexico, the artist constructs a scene involving traditional elements in dance, dress, and music. The medium allows for simplified forms and a variety of textures, such as the waving fringe on the dancer’s dress and a smooth cobblestone road. Chaplin uses repetition of shape to move the viewer’s eye around his composition, in the echoing of the dancer’s left arm with the contour of the man’s instrument, or the dancer’s extended arm reflected in the curve of the archway behind them. In addition to printmaking, Chaplin was a successful painter, writer, and teacher. He was raised in Boston, Massachusetts, educated in exclusive preparatory schools, and later trained under artists William Merritt Chase and George Bellows, and writers Jack London and George Sterling. He founded the Prescott Chaplin School of Art in Los Angeles in the 1930s, having already established himself as an exhibiting artist. He would go on to write screenplays and author a number of books.