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Bertha Lum

  1869 - 1954 (biography)

1923  

gouache and pencil 

8 1/2 x 11 5/16" image 

pencil, bottom right in image 

1 of 1 unique 

in pencil: "copyright 1923 by" and "no 51" 

Gravalos/Pulin 88 for the print 

heavy cream wove 

 

not applicable 

19838 

SOLD

This rare 1923 gouache and pencil drawing is Lum's original which informed her color woodcut of the same name in 1924. The subject anticipates the wedding in 1924 of the last Emperor Showa, and the processional for the princess Nagako Kuni, being escorted to the Imperial City, with lanterns and banners held high. Bertha Lum was born in Tipton, Iowa. She attended the Art Institute of Chicago for one year, studied stained glass with Anne Weston, and illustration with Frank Holme. She spent her honeymoon in Japan in 1903, which was the first of many subsequent trips there. In 1907 she spent fourteen weeks in Japan and began her studies of Japanese wood block under the instruction of Bonkotsu Igami. By 1911, when she spent six months in Japan, she had a strong understanding of the process of color woodcut. She was working in the traditional method of division of labor. Lum exhibited in the Tenth Annual Art Exhibition in Tokyo in 1912, in which hers were the only foreign prints.