ANATOMY OF A PAINTING

“The Most Glorious Experience”

In the early 1890s, ROBERT FREDERICK BLUM spent three years in Japan, capturing glimpes of everyday life.

By Jerry N. Weiss

Robert Frederick Blum (1857–1903) was an artist and illustrator whose gifts were evident in multiple media. With his friend William Merritt Chase (1849–1916) he cofounded the Society of Painters in Pastels; Blum was a member of the American Watercolor Society and was elected a National Academician on the strength of his oil painting. By the time his life was cut short by pneumonia, he’d become one of the finest American artists of his generation.

Blum was born in Cincinnati, where he studied with Frank Duveneck (1848–1919). Lifelong themes were confirmed early: Blum showed interest in Japanese art and was influenced by the light palette and flashing brushwork of Spanish artist Mariano Fortuny (1879–1949). After a year of study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, he moved to New York City and was employed as an illustrator for Scribner’s Magazine. He traveled widely. In 1879, Blum went to Venice, where he met Chase and reconnected with Duveneck. He returned to this city frequently over the next few years, practicing pastel under the guidance of James Whistler (1834–1903). Trips to Spain and the Netherlands followed.

Street Scene in Ikao, Japan

(watercolor, gouache and graphite on off-white wove paper; 10⅜x12⅝) by Robert Frederick Blum

No other place intrigued Blum as Japan did. He visited in 1890 and stayed for three years, producing a series of drawings and paintings that were among the first by an American artist chronicling Japanese culture. It was, he said, “the most glorious experience I have ever had.” In an article for Scribner’s, published in 1893, Blum singled out the town of Ikao, built 2,500 feet up the side of a mountain. “Humble little Ikao,” he wrote, “was so very appealing in its familiar, everyday worldliness, that we all fell in love with it at once.” Street Scene in Ikao, Japan, has a documentary quality that suggests what Blum found appealing: a village, inaccessible to tourist traffic, its inhabitants going about their lives in unselfconscious fashion. WA

Jerry N. Weiss is a contributing writer for fine art magazines. He teaches at the Art Students League of New York.

Blum took part in a new wave of American watercolor painting that valued freer and more spontaneous application. Critical reception of his watercolors was mercurial. Reviews published in the 1880s alternated between unqualified enthusiasm and accusations that the artist was imitating Whistler too closely. At any rate, paintings like Street Scene in Ikao, Japan were a departure from the ephemeral, soft-edged scenery of Venice.

“Humble little Ikao was so very appealing in its familiar, every-day worldliness, that we all fell in love with it at once.” —ROBERT FREDERICK BLUM

Street Scene in Ikao, Japan shows a diagonal passageway between ramshackle buildings with shops open on both sides of the path. One vendor sits cross-legged beside his wares while prospective buyers stroll through. A woman with a baby on her back is a feature in several of Blum’s Ikao watercolors. The scene’s real activity, however, is provided by the geometry of overlapping architecture and the interplay of sharp light and shadow shapes.

The painting’s subdued coloring is enlivened by several spots of blue, including a wisp of smoke at the center that was painted with gouache over transparent watercolor. Buildings and hanging fabrics, bleached by sunlight, are drawn with particular finesse.

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK CITY; GIFT OF WILLIAM J. BAER, 1904

Seemingly trivial elements turn out to be indispensable. Remove the ornamental lamp at upper right or the dark accents of the strolling chickens, and the painting loses some of its vitality. Ikao was Blum’s last stop in Japan before returning to New York. Situated on the slope of a dormant volcano, Ikao was not easily reached. Blum was impressed by the character of its people. He wrote that the village’s “somewhat tedious inaccessibility has preserved in the inhabitants an old-time charm of manners and character unexpectedly new and pleasant.”