Robert Frederick Blum

Scribner's Magazine (commissioned directly from the artist)
By descent in the family to the present owner

Sir Edwin Arnold, "Japonica: Fourth Paper - Japanese Ways and Thoughts," Scribner's Magazine, vol. IX, 1891, illustrated p. 332

Very good condition. Unframed: affixed to mat along upper edge. Board size: 16 ¼ x 12 ½ inches.
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Robert Blum began his academic training at the McMicken School of Design and the Ohio Mechanics Institute in Cincinnati, where in the fall of 1874, he attended a special night class taught by Frank Duveneck. Duveneck's small coterie of young students were known as the 'Duveneck Boys' and included J.H. Twachtman. In 1876, Blum traveled to Philadelphia to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.  While there, he viewed the Centennial Exposition, and Blum became particularly interested in works by European artists Giovanni Boldini and Mario Fortuny.  Through Duveneck, Blum also met William Merritt Chase and James McNeill Whistler, who introduced Blum to the pastel medium and shared his fascination with japonisme.  Blum established his professional reputation in New York in the 1880s through exhibitions at the Society of American Artists and the National Academy of Design, where he was a member.

In May 1890, Blum was commissioned by Scribner's Magazine to illustrate a series of articles on Japan. The oils, watercolors, and drawings made during his two year sojourn illustrated four different articles in Scribner's published between 1891 and 1892.  Since trade with Japan had only been opened by Commodore Perry thirty years earlier and was interrupted during the 1860s by civil wars in both countries, Japanese culture was still relatively new to Americans. Blum therefore documented as much of the country as he could, from its costumes and craftspeople to its customs and dances. One of his masterpieces from this period, The Ameya (circa 1893, Metropolitan Museum of Art), depicts a candy maker on a local village street.

The present work depicts the No (or Noh) dance, a Japanese art form where a traditional canon of stories was performed through a combination of dance, theatre, and poetry. Blum's watercolor accurately depicts many aspects of the No dance, including the four main figures of the dance. The central figure, here in a red costume, is the main actor. This shite, who is often the most extravagantly dressed, wears a mask and carries a fan. The waki, the counterpart to the shite, sits facing the action at the front of the stage. Four musicians, known as the hayashi-kata, sit at the back of the stage and play the stick drum, hip drum, shoulder drum and transverse flute dressed in a traditional Japanese kimono with a kami-shimo, a combination of a shirt-like garment and a waist-coat with exaggerated shoulders. The two stage hands, or koken, observe from the background dressed in virtually unadorned black garments. The stage setting is drawn from the shinto shrines, where the dance was originally performed, represented by the four pillars of the stage and a lone pine tree in the background.

Of the No dance, Sir Edwin Arnold wrote in his Scribner's Magazine essay "the religious, historical, and idyllic dances of the No, which are entirely classical, traditional, and complicated by allusion, [are] very difficult to understand without a key." Of the performance that Arnold observed he stated: "It is simply a dance of a love-lorn girl in company with a rural swain, but full of such grace, such artistic spirit, such measure marriage of foot and heart, that a Parisian or Viennese pas-seul became a clumsy athleticism matched with it" ("Japonica: Fourth Paper - Japanese Ways and Thoughts," vol. IX, 1891, p. 337).