Robert Frederick Blum (1857-1903)
An artist of remarkable versatility, Blum excelled in a variety of media (drawing, watercolor, pastel, and oil) and was also an accomplished etcher, illustrator and muralist. He undertook initial training in his hometown of Cincinnati -- a remarkably fertile mid-nineteenth-century artistic community -- but became inspired to pursue further study after viewing the Japanese and European art at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Though Blum kept a studio in New York, his work bears the stamp of his frequent travel to Europe as well as his association with James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Frank Duveneck, whom he met in Venice. Along with William Merritt Chase, Blum elevated the visibility of the pastel medium when the two co-founded the Society of Painters in Pastel, whose first New York exhibition was held in 1884.
Blum produced refined portraits as well as interior and exterior genre scenes, often set in the varied locations he visited. Japan, which had been an early source of inspiration to the young artist, became an even larger driving force in Blum's career when Scribner's Magazine sent him there on an illustration assignment in 1890. One of the first American artists to visit the country, he stayed two years, engrossed in what was then considered to be highly exotic and rather mysterious subject matter. Toward the end of his abbreviated career, Blum was awarded two important mural commissions, and continued to paint works from his travels and the view from his Greenwich Village apartment.