Study in Japanese Costume

Painted between 1890 and 1892 during Robert Blum's residence in Japan and now in the Brooklyn Museum, Study in Japanese Costume is one of a closely related pair of intimate oil studies — the other is the Brooklyn Museum's Woman in Japanese Costume — that Blum produced from a young female model in his Tokyo studio. The small vertical canvas shows the model standing in three-quarter view wearing a patterned summer kimono with a wide obi, her hair drawn back in the elaborate marumage of an older married woman; she stands against a plain washed background that throws into relief the precision of Blum's drawing of the textile pattern, the fall of the obi and the angle of her foot. The handling is direct, brilliant in colour and unstudied, recording Blum's response to the Japanese figure with the same bravura technique he had brought to his Venetian street scenes a few years earlier.

The Brooklyn Museum pair belong to a small group of half-length figure studies that Blum produced in Tokyo as the preliminary studies for the larger compositions he hoped to send back to The Century Magazine for Sir Edwin Arnold's Japonica series, but which he ultimately chose to keep as independent paintings. They were among the most admired works in his 1893 New York studio exhibition and were acquired by the Brooklyn Museum at the artist's posthumous sale; together with Woman in Japanese Costume they remain one of the museum's principal holdings of late-nineteenth-century American japonisme and a foundational document of the Western pictorial response to Meiji-era kimono dress.