Sailboat

This drawing from 1900 depicts a sailboat and represents one of Bertha Lum's earliest known works, predating her first trip to Japan by three years. At this point, Lum was still working within Western artistic conventions, having studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. The sailboat subject, rendered in drawing rather than woodblock, shows the foundational draftsmanship that would later serve her when she took up the demanding craft of block carving. The simplicity of a single vessel on water — a universal subject across artistic traditions — connects this early work to her later maritime prints of Japanese junks and fishing boats, suggesting a lifelong attraction to the visual poetry of sail and sea that would eventually find its fullest expression in the woodblock medium.