Pestling the Paddy

Held in the Art Institute of Chicago, Pestling the Paddy is a black-watercolour drawing on ivory wove paper (approximately 30.8 by 27.6 cm) that Robert Blum produced from his stay in Japan as one of the working studies used for illustration. The drawing depicts a Japanese figure husking rice with the traditional foot-treadle pestle of the rural mortar — the everyday agricultural implement that turned brown rice into the polished white grain consumed in the urban markets — and is rendered in the rapid wash-and-line manner of Blum's working drawings, with the figure and the wooden mortar firmly outlined and the surrounding setting suggested in a few quickly drawn washes. The Art Institute drawing is one of a small group of similar wash studies that Blum produced for The Century Magazine's Japonica series and that survive in American public collections as the principal record of the working procedure behind his published illustrations.

The drawing entered the Art Institute of Chicago collection through the museum's early commitment to American works on paper and remains one of the museum's holdings of late-nineteenth-century American japonisme. Together with the Cleveland Museum of Art's etchings and the Library of Congress's pen drawings, it forms part of the corpus of Blum's Japan-period works on paper — the body of material that complements the major oils and that records the daily working practice of an American painter who, almost uniquely among his generation, made his Japan studies in the streets and fields rather than in the foreign quarter of Yokohama.