Bertha Lum

Bertha Boynton Lum (1869 – 1954) was an American artist known for helping popularize the Japanese and Chinese woodblock print outside of Asia.

Lum's father was Joseph W. Bull (1841–1923), a lawyer and her mother was Harriet Ann Boynton (1842–1925), a school teacher.

[3][4] From November 1901 to March 1902, she studied figure drawing at the Art Institute of Chicago and was influenced by the Japanese techniques of Arthur Wesley Dow in his book Composition, which was published in 1899.

They spent their seven-week honeymoon in Japan, where she searched for a print maker who could teach her the traditional ukiyo-e method.

With help from a professor at the Imperial Art School in Tokyo, she was introduced to the block cutter Igami Bonkutsu (1875–1933) in Yokohama.

[7] During the Great Depression, Lum made a living selling prints and illustrating books, newspapers, and magazines, including the New York Herald Tribune and Good Housekeeping.

Her younger daughter Eleanor "Peter" Lum married the diplomat Sir Colin Tradescant Crowe and became an author.

In 1936 her elder daughter Catherine married Antonio Riva, an Italian pilot during World War I who was executed in 1951 in Beijing for an alleged plot to assassinate Mao Zedong.