Venetian Lacemakers

Painted in 1887 and held in the Cincinnati Art Museum, Venetian Lacemakers is the canvas that confirmed Robert Blum's reputation in the late 1880s as the leading American painter of Venetian street and craft scenes and prepared him technically for the work he would undertake in Japan three years later. The large horizontal painting depicts a group of Venetian women working at point de Venise lace in the open courtyard of one of the city's lace-making houses, the seated figures bent over their cushions in a long horizontal frieze that extends across the picture plane against a backdrop of stuccoed walls and a glimpse of canal at the right. Blum had spent five successive summers in Venice from 1880 and the painting is the culmination of his Venetian work, integrating the brilliant small-touch handling that he had absorbed from Mariano Fortuny with a controlled compositional structure of his own devising.

The canvas was exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1887 and was widely reproduced in the American press; it was acquired by the Cincinnati Art Museum at the artist's posthumous sale in 1905 as the centrepiece of its Blum bequest. Together with the museum's Japan-period canvases, it forms one half of the great pair through which Cincinnati documents its native son's two principal subjects, and it remains a foundational document of late-nineteenth-century American painting of Venice — a tradition that Blum, William Merritt Chase and John Singer Sargent had jointly defined in the years between 1880 and 1890.