Profile Head of a Japanese Girl

Etched by Robert Blum in 1879 and held in the Cleveland Museum of Art (1920.1313), Profile Head of a Japanese Girl is one of the earliest surviving works in which Blum addresses a Japanese subject — almost a decade before his actual residence in Japan. The etching depicts the profile of a young Japanese woman, her hair arranged in a traditional style and the line of her neck and jaw rendered in the fine, precise drypoint manner that Blum had developed under his Cincinnati teacher Frank Duveneck and from his study of Whistler's Venetian and Thames etchings. Like a number of American and European artists of his generation, Blum was producing prints of Japanese figures by the late 1870s, drawing on the models who had begun appearing in New York and on the kimono and accessories that filled the Japanese sections of department stores like Tiffany and Vantine in the years after the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial.