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Blum, Robert Frederick, That is Where All Babies Live in Japan, 1890-92

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Blum, Robert Frederick, That is Where All Babies Live in Japan, 1890-92

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Robert Frederick Blum, American, 1857–1903
That is Where All Babies Live in Japan, 1890–92
Watercolor on board
35.7 x 27.4 cm. (14 1/16 x 10 13/16 in.)
Gift of Charles Scribner III, Class of 1973 and Graduate School Class of 1977
x1993-163
In an 1893 account of his journey to Japan published in Scribner’s Magazine, Blum writes about his "wild desire" to visit that country, which he traces back to his purchase of a Japanese fan at a music festival in Cincinnati when he was just fifteen years old. After studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Blum had his dream realized when Scribner’s commissioned him in 1890 to illustrate a series of articles about Japan, where he remained for two and a half years. Blum’s full-page illustration, for which this is

a study, accompanies a text describing how children as young as five carried their siblings on their backs while they ran, jumped, flew kites, and fished for frogs.

Robert Frederick Blum (1857–1903) was born in Cincinnati, American Impressionist Robert Blum studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia before moving to New York, but it was a sojourn to Venice that proved especially influential. There he worked with former teacher Frank Duveneck and close friend William Merritt Chase. His neighbor at the time was James Abbott McNeill Whistler, who encouraged the younger artist to experiment with pastels and study the principles of Japanese design, a topic that interested Blum throughout his life, culminating with a trip to Japan from 1890 to 1892.

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Date

1890
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Source

Princeton University Art Museum
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public domain

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