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.

The Cleveland Museum holds thirteen Blum etchings, almost the entire surviving etched oeuvre, as the gift of the Print Club of Cleveland in 1920; the museum's collection includes both the early Cincinnati and New York work and the mature Venetian plates of the mid-1880s. Profile Head of a Japanese Girl stands at the beginning of Blum's long engagement with Japanese subjects, more than a decade before his arrival in Yokohama in 1890, and is therefore one of the principal documents of the first American japonisme of the late 1870s — the pre-residence period in which Japanese subjects entered American art primarily through prints, drawings and the consumer culture of the imported kimono.