Vintage Bertha Lum Three Wise Men Original Color Woodcut Signed Dated Japanese Inspired

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Three men mounted atop camels gazing intently into the distance at left, stars glow in the deep blue night sky … Read more Three men mounted atop camels gazing intently into the distance at left, stars glow in the deep blue night sky above. Near the ground in the fore is a glowing ember and smoke like form, possibly engaging with the riders.

Created by Bertha Boynton Lum (1869-1954), ca 1918 this is of the edition printed in 1921, color woodcut with hand coloring. Pencil signed and dated 1921 along lower edge, #32 of the edition of at least 142. There may be a later unnumbered edition.

Lum was significantly influenced by Japanese printing and her personal experiences in Japan.

17 3/8"H x 10"W sight, in 24 1/4"H x 16" frame on cream wove paper. Slight spotting/foxing of mat but print is unaffected.

Gump’s San Francisco framing label on reverse

See: Bertha Lum, by Gravelos & Pulin, 1991, #58


Abridged biography from bertha-lum.org

Bertha B. Lum was born Bertha Boynton Bull in May 1869 in Typton, Iowa. She studied art at the Institute of Art at Chicago from 1895-1900. She was a student of Anna Weston. She followed then the courses of Frank Holme who founded the Chicago School of Illustration in 1898 and who was trying to print with woodblocks.

In 1903 she married Burt F. Lum, a lawyer from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Their honeymoon takes them to Japan, which captivates Bertha.

As Bertha studied with Frank Holme, she was interested in woodblock printing.

“Before I went to Japan, I thought that print makers were as easy to find as paper lanterns or kimonos but after I spent six weeks asking everyone who spoke English – guides, ricksha boys, hotel proprietors and curio dealers – were I could buy tools and see them make prints, and found no one to tell me, I became utterly discouraged and only succeeded the week before I sailed from home, in being directed to a shop where they reproduced old prints, and it was an hour spent there that gave me all the knowledge I had of the process aside from what I had learned from books.

Three years later she returns to Japan. “...went miles and miles far into the suburbs of Tokyo, down back streets and finally at the end of an alley, where the poorest people lived, in a very small house of four rooms, we found the man who was supposed to cut the best blocks in Tokyo– and there I worked every day for two months. My teachers were mostly two apprentices of twelve years of age, “the master” coming in once or twice a day to approve, or mostly disapprove, of my progress.”

The master engraver was Igami Bonkotsu.

After having learned how to cut, she went to the printer (Nishimura Kamakichi) and there again she stayed many weeks watching young apprentices color in her own prints.

“When I was ready to stop cutting blocks, accompanied by the professor and “the master” I was taken to another part of the city and presented with due ceremony to the printer.”

For some years, (in the US) she cut and printed her prints herself. Later she employed one, then several printers to color in her works.

She had two daughters: Catherine Balliet Lum and Eleanor Peter Lum.

Bertha Lum held a lot of exhibitions that allowed her to make herself known and sell her works. She was an artist who lived well off her art; the sale of her works in a Californian art gallery brought her in 500 $ a month, which was a considerable sum at the time. For a little she lived in Japan, before settling in Peking in 1922, near the Forbidden City.

She returned to California (from 1924 to 1927) and used that time to diversify her art. On her return to China, she settled in a different house, this one also close to the Forbidden City.

There are no traces of her work after 1937 Her eyesight was at this time deteriorating.

She left China in 1947 to live in the United States, but returned in 1948. She left China definitively in 1953, and went to live with her daughter Catherine at Genoa, Italy where she died in February 1954. See less