Study Sketches

Robert Frederick Blum's ink sketches demonstrate the rapid figure studies that trained illustrators of the late nineteenth century. Two loosely rendered figures—one facing away, one in profile—show economical line work and gestural notation typical of working drawings. Such studies formed the visual foundation for newspaper illustration and the emerging sequential art forms that would define the comic strip. Blum's economical technique and clear rendering of human figures in motion would influence the visual language that cartoonists developed for the Sunday supplements and daily papers.