Laughing Girl,
1936
Etching

Extended loan from the Lydia and Warren Chappell Collection
EL 1975.15.28

The young woman is totally, merrily, twentieth-century American, and yet worthy of Rubens or Adriaen Brouwer or even Judith Leyster. Bishop's unsqueamish acutely unfoolish sympathy is also total: "I hope my work is recognizable as being by a woman, though I certainly would never deliberately make it feminine in any way." She especially liked to depict the young female office workers of the Union Square area in New York: "It's a moment in their lives when they are really in motion...the time I like to catch them is the lunch hour...they have stopped but, in a sense, the work day is continuing..." In Bishop, the ordinary seems free and strong.