Two Idlers

In September 1888, Blum began working on "Two Idlers" in Brick Church, New Jersey, near the home of the artist William Jacob Baer and his wife Laura, who served as his models. Since mid-1885, William Baer worked as the drawing instructor of a local art club known as the Carbonari. He also taught several painting classes for women, and regularly received commissions to paint portraits of prominent residents of Orange County. The former Laura Schenk, a native of Spires-On-The-Rhine, according to one author, was a "charming young German lady, an accomplished musician, and graduate of the Music Conservatory of Munich." Blum's picture is a psychological study of well-to-do individuals in the manner of works by the 19th-century European artists William Quiller Orchardson and James Tissot. Art historian William H. Gerdts has noted that American artists of the period rarely treated the subject of idleness with as much sensitivity to the "complex psychological or social situation" as Blum did in "Two Idlers". The landscape elements in the painting are handled in an Impressionist manner. Using a palette knife, Blum applied dabs of color that are brilliant in hue. Paint is applied quickly and aggressively, creating areas of thick impasto. Light takes on a chromatic brilliance and appears to penetrate or delicately envelop forms. The time was ripe for Blum's adoption of selective aspects of Impressionism as several recent exhibitions had introduced the daring French style to America.