Studio of Robert F. Blum

Painted between 1883 and 1884 and now held in the Cincinnati Art Museum, Studio of Robert F. Blum is the most ambitious self-portrait-in-setting that Blum produced in the years immediately before his Venetian breakthrough. The medium-scale oil depicts the painter's New York studio in the building at 80 Washington Square East where he worked through the mid-1880s, with the artist himself shown at the easel in the centre of the composition and the densely furnished interior — Japanese fans, Venetian glassware, North African rugs and the accumulated studio props of an internationalist American painter of the period — packed into the surrounding space. The handling is brilliant in the small touches characteristic of Blum's Fortuny-derived manner, and the painting is a remarkable document of the aestheticism of the early 1880s American studio.

The canvas was acquired by the Cincinnati Art Museum at the 1905 posthumous sale and remains one of its principal Blum holdings. Together with similar studio paintings by William Merritt Chase and Frederick Stuart Church, the picture is a foundational document of the American studio aesthetic of the early 1880s — the moment at which the New York painters of Blum's generation transformed their working spaces into the densely decorated interiors that the period understood as the natural setting for cosmopolitan painting. The presence of the Japanese fans on the walls is the earliest pictorial sign of Blum's interest in Japan, predating his actual residence in the country by some seven years.