ROBERT FREDERICK BLUM

Robert Frederick Blum was born in Cincinnati in 1857. At age sixteen, he apprenticed at a lithographic house and took evening classes with Frank Duveneck. He also studied for a year at the Pennsylvania Academy. In 1880, he traveled to Venice, where he joined Duveneck’s circle of painters and also met Whistler, who had a great aesthetic influence on him. He spent the 1880s in Europe and New York City, where he established a studio and associated with American impressionists William Merritt Chase and John Twachtman. In 1890, he went to Japan to create the illustrations for Sir Edwin Arnold’s Japonica. There, he produced many elegant Japanese subject paintings in oil and pastel. He returned to New York in 1892 and completed a series of murals for the Mendelssohn Glee Club, which are now in the Brooklyn Museum. He lived in seclusion after 1893 and died in 1903. He exhibited widely during his lifetime: at the Metropolitan Museum, PAFA, National Academy, Boston Art Club, Paris Expo., Cincinnati Art Museum, and the Royal Academy in London. His works hang today at the Metropolitan Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and City Art Museum of St. Louis.