The Ameya

Painted in 1893 and held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art since the artist's death, The Ameya is the masterpiece of Robert Blum's Japan period and the finest single Western painting of a Meiji street scene. The large horizontal oil — approximately 64 by 79 inches — depicts the ameya, a travelling candy-seller, kneeling on the ground in the open street of a Tokyo neighbourhood with the long bamboo pipe through which he blows hot sugar paste into the small animal-shaped sweets demanded by the crowd of children watching him. Blum shows the moment at which the figure of a rabbit, half-formed at the end of the pipe, is being inflated under the absorbed gaze of two children seated on the ground and the standing figures of older onlookers, with the deep recession of the street running to a distant gate at the right. The brilliantly observed lighting, the carefully recorded clothing of every figure and the integration of the Japanese subject into a coherent multi-figure composition mark the painting as one of the great American figure paintings of the late nineteenth century.

The ameya tradition of street confectionery — sugar paste blown into birds, fish, dragons and rabbits — was recorded in countless Edo and Meiji prints and was a standard subject of [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) from the mid-nineteenth century onward; Blum's painting is the most ambitious Western response to that tradition. He worked on the canvas through 1892 and 1893, completing it in his New York studio after his return from Japan, and submitted it to the Society of American Artists in 1893 where it was widely praised by critics including William C. Brownell. The Metropolitan Museum acquired it from the artist's estate in 1903 and it has remained in continuous display in the museum's American Wing as one of the principal canvases of late-nineteenth-century American art.