Robert Blum

Robert Frederick Blum (1857-1903) was a Cincinnati-born American painter, etcher and illustrator whose two long working stays in Japan between 1890 and 1892 produced the most ambitious series of paintings of Meiji-era street life made by any nineteenth-century Western observer. Although Blum never worked as a woodblock artist himself, his place in the Hanga roster is secured by the depth and the documentary value of the Japan work, which forms one of the principal Western pictorial responses to the same Meiji print culture that gave rise to Yōshū Chikanobu, Kobayashi Kiyochika, Mizuno Toshikata and the founding generation of shin-hanga publishers a decade later.

Blum was born on 9 July 1857 in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of German immigrants Joseph and Eliza Blum. He left school at thirteen to apprentice as a lithographer at the firm of Gibson and Sons, and from 1874 attended evening classes at the McMicken School of Design and the recently founded Cincinnati School of Design under the painter Frank Duveneck, whose energetic dark-toned manner shaped the early generation of Cincinnati painters. In 1876 the nineteen-year-old Blum travelled to Philadelphia to see the Centennial Exposition, and there he encountered for the first time the work of Mariano Fortuny (1838-1874), whose brilliantly handled small-scale genre scenes set in Spain and Morocco would become Blum's most decisive single influence; the Japanese pavilion at the same exposition, by an accident of biography, provided the second of his lifelong subjects.

From 1879 Blum was based in New York, where he became a founding member of the Society of American Artists and a regular contributor to Scribner's Monthly (after 1881 The Century Magazine) for which he produced illustrations of Spain, Holland and above all Venice. He travelled to Venice in 1880 with the watercolourist Frank Duveneck Boys William Merritt Chase and Frank Duveneck himself, and returned every summer through the mid-1880s; the resulting Venetian street scenes, etchings and watercolours — the Venetian Lacemakers (1887, Cincinnati Art Museum) and the long series of small etchings now in the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cleveland Museum of Art — established his reputation as one of the finest American draughtsmen of his generation. He was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1893.

In May 1890 Blum left New York for Japan on commission from Sir Edwin Arnold and The Century Magazine, which was preparing a long illustrated series of articles by Arnold under the title Japonica. Blum landed at Yokohama in June 1890 and remained in Japan for the next two and a half years, working principally in Tokyo with shorter campaigns in Kyoto, Nikkō and the Kantō countryside. Unlike most Western visitors of the period, Blum lived in rented Japanese houses rather than the Western quarter, learned working Japanese, and worked outdoors in the streets and at temple festivals; the resulting body of work — oil paintings, watercolours, pastels and pen drawings — constitutes the most sustained pictorial response by any American painter to Meiji urban life. The pictures supply the illustrations for Arnold's Japonica articles published in The Century Magazine between November 1890 and December 1891, and were collected with additional text in the book Japonica (Scribner's, 1891), one of the most widely circulated American treatments of Japan in the nineteenth century.

The principal canvases of the Japan period are The Silk Merchant, Japan (1892, Cincinnati Art Museum), The Ameya (1893, Metropolitan Museum of Art), Gun-hammer Queue (Cincinnati Art Museum), Study in Japanese Costume and Woman in Japanese Costume (both Brooklyn Museum), and Japanese Woman (New Britain Museum of American Art). The Ameya — depicting the candy-seller (ameya) blowing sugar paste into animal shapes for the crowd of children gathered around him — is the masterpiece of the group and one of the finest Western paintings of a Meiji street scene; the Met acquired it on the artist's death in 1903. Henry Wolf's wood engraving Japanese Girl (The Musmee), made for The Century Magazine in 1891 after a Blum painting that has since been lost, circulated more widely still and remains in the Smithsonian American Art Museum as one of the standard images of late-nineteenth-century American japonisme.

Blum returned from Japan in December 1892 already established as the leading American painter of Japanese subjects, and the years between his return and his early death in 1903 were occupied principally with the great decorative cycle Moods to Music and Vintage Festival (1895-1898, Brooklyn Museum), painted for Andrew Carnegie's Mendelssohn Hall in New York and now in the Brooklyn Museum after the Hall's demolition. The decorations — among the largest mural cycles produced by an American painter of his generation — drew on his Venetian, Japanese and Spanish travels and integrated the linear refinement of his Japan work with the brilliance of palette that he had absorbed from Fortuny. He died of pneumonia in New York on 8 June 1903 at the age of forty-five.

Blum's reputation, eclipsed in the early twentieth century by the rise of the American Impressionists and by the shifting scholarly preference for Whistler as the American interpreter of Japan, has steadily recovered. The 1966 Cincinnati Art Museum exhibition Robert Frederick Blum, 1857-1903, the 2014 publication by Bruce Weber of Robert Blum and His Milieu, and the 2020 reinstallation of the Brooklyn Museum's Mendelssohn Hall cycle have re-established Blum as one of the central figures of late-nineteenth-century American art and as the most important Western pictorial witness to Meiji-era Japan. His principal holdings are at the Cincinnati Art Museum (which received the artist's bequest in 1905), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, with further works at the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Library of Congress, the Princeton University Art Museum and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.