Japanese Girl (The Musmee)

Held in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Japanese Girl (The Musmee) is the wood-engraving made by Henry Wolf in 1891 after the oil painting by Robert Blum of the same year that appeared as the frontispiece of Sir Edwin Arnold's Japonica series in The Century Magazine. Blum's original oil — which has since been lost — depicted a young Japanese woman in summer kimono seated in three-quarter view; the term "musmee," anglicised from the Japanese musume ("young woman" or "girl"), was a common Western usage of the period popularised by Arnold and Pierre Loti for the Japanese female figure. Wolf's wood engraving was the principal image used to advertise the Century series and was one of the most widely reproduced images of American japonisme in the early 1890s; it is the only surviving record of the lost Blum painting and has therefore become the standard pictorial reference to that key work of his Japan period.

The engraving entered the Smithsonian American Art Museum collection as part of the museum's holdings of Henry Wolf, the leading American wood engraver of his generation, whose other engravings after Whistler, Sargent and Homer occupy an important place in the museum's nineteenth-century print collection. The image is in regular use as the standard illustration of late-nineteenth-century American magazine japonisme and remains the most widely circulated of all images derived from Blum's Japan paintings; it was the principal pictorial vehicle through which middle-class American readers of the 1890s formed their image of the Meiji-era Japanese woman.