Katherine Keenum

On my living room wall, I have a framed poster of the 1879 John Singer Sargent painting that inspired me to send Jeanette and Edward to the Luxembourg Garden. Earlier this week , a friend who worked in the movie business for years came over. When I explained what the poster meant to me, she said, “I knew that designers for historical movies went to museums to study how things looked, but I’d never thought about fiction writers doing the same thing.”

Then this morning I came across this painting of Saint Mark’s Square by William Wyld at Charley Parker’s Lines and Colors. Parker writes: There are dozens, if not hundreds of beautifully rendered paintings and drawings of that most famous of Venice’s public squares, but most are from the far end, looking down the full length of the plaza. Here, Wyld gives us a much more intimate view, the kind you might encounter as you walked about the edges of the square.

It set me thinking about what sorts of images are most helpful to a writer in visualizing settings. I love to catch glimpses of gardens and landscapes through the windows of paintings from the 15th through the 17th century (as does my character Edward). But here is a reminder that seeing what a character might see from the ground allows the imagination to move in a scene—especially on line when you can Zoomify.