Gun-hammer Queue

Painted between 1890 and 1892 during Robert Blum's residence in Japan and now in the Cincinnati Art Museum, Gun-hammer Queue is the title Blum used for an unusual half-length portrait of a Japanese man with his hair arranged in the distinctive top-knot whose backward-pointing shape was likened in Meiji parlance to a gun-hammer. The small oil shows the sitter in profile against a plain wash background, his face firmly modelled in the warm earth tones characteristic of Blum's Japan work and the elaborate hair structure carefully recorded; the title preserves the curiosity-tinged interest the American painter took in the survivals of Edo-period hair-dressing into the Meiji decades, when the imperial decree of 1871 had abolished the formal top-knot for samurai but the older styles persisted among older men and labourers for some decades.

The painting is one of the principal studio works that Blum left to the Cincinnati Art Museum in his 1903 bequest and is among the finest examples of his Japan-period portrait practice. Together with The Silk Merchant, Japan and the smaller Japanese figure studies, it forms the central group of Blum's Cincinnati Japan holdings — a body of work that constitutes the most concentrated Western pictorial response to Meiji-era Tokyo street life produced by any nineteenth-century American painter and a documentary record whose value is heightened by the post-1923 obliteration of the urban world Blum had observed.