Robert Frederick Blum visited Venice for the first time in the summer of 1880 and found himself irrepressibly captivated by the light-filled “floating city,” making a total of six trips throughout the 1880s. In Entrance to the Grand Canal, Venice, Blum captures the leisurely glide of gondolas across a tranquil plane of vibrant blue. Dancing with radiant air and color, the canvas’s high horizon line, refined color palette and flattened perspective draw inspiration from Blum’s enthusiasm for Japanese design and his association with the American expatriate artists in Venice.

Since artists gravitated toward Florence and Rome in the mid-19th century, it was not until the 1870s that Venice became a setting ripe for painterly experimentation. Partially influenced by the change in political climate as Venice was brought into a united Italy in 1866, the city quickly became a hub of culture and fashion. American and British artists especially traveled there in droves to capture its exotic splendor. “How gorgeous it all is I can’t say,” wrote American illustrator Kenyon Cox. “I think I never have lived nor enjoyed until now. The city is just a dream of color and beauty” (quoted in Exh. Cat., New York, Adelson Galleries, Sargent’s Venice, 2007, p. 163).

Though one of the first, Blum was not the only artist that arrived on the shores of the Venetian artistic scene in 1880. The start of the decade also marked John Singer Sargent’s first period of prolific activity in Venice, where he depicted intimate scenes in dim interiors and secluded alleys—later on, in the early 1900s, he became preoccupied with the city’s canals and historic architecture.

Blum’s most significant influence throughout the decade, however, would come from his fellow expatriate James McNeill Whistler. A commission from the Fine Arts Society of London for 12 etchings of Venice brought Whistler there in 1879, and Blum quickly became acquainted with him. Whistler left an indelible impact on Blum’s oeuvre as he adopted the stylistic ideals of Whistler’s Aesthetic Movement, championing the principle of “art for art’s sake.” “Whistler is here, and I know him well, and he is very busy making an etching from my window and he seems very much interested in me and though I am sometimes dissatisfied with my work he always encourages me. He is a nice man,” Blum commented in a letter (quoted in Bruce Weber, Robert Frederick Blum (1857-1903) and His Milieu, Doctoral dissertation, City University of New York, p. 108).

Whistler’s compositions were rife with Eastern influences, as he incorporated Japanese motifs and employed Japanese principles of color and design in his work. In turn, Blum imitated Whistler’s abstracted handling of color and perspective, which is particularly notable in Entrance to the Grand Canal, Venice. Weber writes, “Like Whistler and the Japanese Ukiyo-e printmakers, Blum did not attempt to create a realistic, rational space according to Western convention, but instead wove elements into a subtly conceived and harmonious design, reducing and smoothing out detail, carefully arranging large and simple forms” (ibid., p. 113).

In contrast to other artists’ depictions of the entrance to the Grand Canal, Blum narrows the scope of the canvas to center on the pale, distant line that marks where the sky meets the water. While artists such as Thomas Moran, Canaletto or Paul Signac drew heavily upon Venice’s ancient architecture to provide compositional structure to their interpretations of the landscape, Blum clearly reduced their scale and significance in favor of the uninterrupted, jewel-toned blue that adorns the bulk of the work. The work’s monochromatic palette echo Whistler’s tenets of harmonious color, while the simplified masses of the gondolas and nondescript features of the figures establish the clear focal point of the almost-abstracted blue sky and water.

A luminous jewel of a painting, the present work is fresh to market, having last appeared at public auction over a century ago. Entrance to the Grand Canal, Venice represents an iconic subject from the most acclaimed era of the artist’s oeuvre.