Head of a Woman with Long Hair

Robert Frederick Blum · n.d.

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

Image/plate: 36.7 × 23.5 cm (14 1/2 × 9 5/16 in.); Sheet: 44.5 × 33.5 cm (17 9/16 × 13 1/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Realism

Robert Frederick Blum's *Head of a Woman with Long Hair* is a quietly arresting study in tenderness and restraint, its subject rendered with an intimacy that feels both personal and timeless. Blum was one of the most technically versatile American artists of the late nineteenth century — equally at home with pastel, pen, and oil — and his figure work carries a sensitivity shaped by years spent studying in Venice and later Japan. His portraits and figure studies often strip away elaborate settings to let the sitter's presence do the work, and this painting is no exception. The loose, flowing hair and soft handling of light reflect his deep admiration for Whistler and the broader Aesthetic Movement's belief that beauty needed no further justification. Blum trained under Frank Duveneck in Cincinnati before moving to New York, where he became a founding member of the Society of American Artists, a group that challenged the conservatism of the National Academy of Design. This hand-painted oil reproduction faithfully preserves Blum's characteristic softness — the way tone dissolves into tone, the delicate fall of light across the subject's features — so you can live with a work that rarely leaves the walls of the Art Institute of Chicago.