Lot Essay
RELATED LITERATURE
B. Weber, Robert Frederick Blum and His Milieu, Ann Arbor, 1985
The Connoisseur of Watercolors is part of a series of works influenced by the Italian painter, Mario Fortuny, that Blum painted in the late 1870s, and may have been included in the 1879 exhibition at the American Watercolor Society that thrust Blum into the limelight of the New York art scene. The present work relates to another watercolor of a similar figure examining an oriental vase, The Connoisseur, now lost but known through a pen and ink sketch reproduced in a contemporary issue of the American Art Review.
B. Weber, Robert Frederick Blum and His Milieu, Ann Arbor, 1985
The Connoisseur of Watercolors is part of a series of works influenced by the Italian painter, Mario Fortuny, that Blum painted in the late 1870s, and may have been included in the 1879 exhibition at the American Watercolor Society that thrust Blum into the limelight of the New York art scene. The present work relates to another watercolor of a similar figure examining an oriental vase, The Connoisseur, now lost but known through a pen and ink sketch reproduced in a contemporary issue of the American Art Review.