Children

This 1912 color woodcut depicts children, a subject that recurs throughout Bertha Lum's career and reflects her genuine affection for the young people she encountered in Japan and later in China and Southeast Asia. Unlike the idealized children of Victorian Western illustration, Lum's figures possess an observational directness — their postures, clothing, and activities drawn from life rather than convention. She prints the image using the water-based pigments of Japanese tradition rather than oil-based inks, achieving the soft, luminous color that distinguishes true woodblock prints from Western relief printing. The children's presence brings warmth and immediacy to a technique that can tend toward decorative abstraction in less empathetic hands.