Mead Art Museum Under the Hill

Click image to view animated slideshow

Under the Hill, ca. 1919
Drypoint, six states
Gift of Josephine Haskell Aldridge in memory of Richard Aldridge (Class of 1952)
AC 1996.212-16,219


This exhibition includes a series of six states (stages of work) for Under the Hill, a drypoint print Haskell completed around 1919. Artists and scholars value successive proofs for their ability to illustrate the process of developing and refining a printing matrix. This series documents a single printing plate at six distinct phases (or states) in its development. Annotations on certain impressions further clarify Haskell’s working methods.

Considered together, these progressive impressions of Haskell’s Under the Hill show that developing a print involves more than a mere accumulation of visual information. The process is both additive and subtractive, and a printmaker puts as much consideration into what is excluded as into what is drawn.

This animated slideshow of the state proofs in sequence provides a guided tour of Haskell’s working procedure for this image.

Visitors may request to see this object in the Mead’s William Green Study Room when it is no longer on display in the museum.