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Picturing a World

Learning by blogging

August 21, 2014
Tags: Hassam, Paris landmark, Dogs, transportation
Frederick Childe Hassam,Paris Street Scene (1887)
To complement Bellows’ Steaming Trains, I was looking for one of Hassam’s American urban landscapes when I came across this image of Paris. Aha! One of the Wallace water fountains I didn’t know about until this summer. Well, well.

My experience is that you don't leave a fictional world behind even after you finish a story. Things keep reminding you of it and adding to your understanding of characters, setting, and motives. And there’s nothing like blogging to make you bring together bits of this and that! Read More 
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Wallace water fountains

July 10, 2014
Tags: Franco-Prussian War, Paris landmark
Pierre Vidal, Wallace Water Fountain (1893)
Writers of historical fiction are susceptible to what someone called “research rapture,” elation over trivia. It may be just as well that I did not know about Wallace water fountains when I wrote Where the Light Falls or I might have gleefully included one whether it was needed or not.

A recent BBC piece on impoverished Britons in France alerted me to the existence of these public drinking fountains.  Read More 
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Henri’s Jardin du Luxembourg

April 7, 2014
Tags: Henri, Paris landmark, gardens
Robert Henri, Au Jardin du Luxembourg (1899)
After Jeanette completes Edward's portrait, they walk to the Luxembourg Garden. This painting of it by Robert Henri is reproduced in Barbara Weinberg’s book, The Lure of Paris:Nineteenth-Century American Painters and Their French Teachers (1991), my real introduction to the whole topic of an American woman studying art in Paris. Consequently, although the picture was painted twenty years after the action of my novel and in a later style, its vividness has been with me all along. Read More 
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Drums at the Tuileries Garden

March 20, 2014
Tags: Edward, Tissot, Tuileries, Paris landmark
James Tissot, Beating the Retreat in the Tuileries Gardens (1867)
"The naked upper branches reached toward a primordial wildness having little to do with parks or men.… The trees at Shiloh had been like that.… In the growing dusk, golden lights pricked out the Rue de Rivoli to his left.… At the rat-a-tat-tat of a drum being beaten to signal the closing hour, he felt a momentary urge to flout the martial-sounding order."

I was looking for a different painting by James Tissot last week  Read More 
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Atget

March 13, 2014
Tags: Atget, Paris landmark, photograph, work-in-progress
Eugène Atget, Quai d'Anjou, 6h du matin (1924)

Time for a photograph at the blog, I thought: I’ll do a post on Eugène Atget. As it happens, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has a show up through May 9th, Paris as Muse: Photography, 1840s–1950s, where Atget's Quai d'Anjou can be seen.

I looked at a lot of Atget's photographs  Read More 
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Pont Neuf

February 22, 2014
Tags: Beraud, Edward, Jeanette, Parisienne, Paris landmark, Dogs
Jean-Georges Béraud, Le Pont Neuf (n.d.)
Jeepers! I've just noticed that Thursday's post was not published. Better late than never, take a walk on the Pont Neuf!

When Jeanette returns from Pont Aven at the end of August 1879, she and Edward walk along Left Bank of the Seine on a Sunday afternoon. The scene is set farther down river than the Pont Neuf, but Béraud’s painting captures the casual, strolling ease that I wanted readers to feel.

Notice the Morris column advertising kiosk, the grille around the trees, the black-clad Parisiénne, and the little dog—recurring motifs for imagining Paris in this period.  Read More 
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Palace ruins

January 9, 2014
Tags: Carolus-Duran, Edward, Franco-Prussian War, Meissonier, Paris landmark, Tuileries
Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, Ruins of the Tuileries Palace (1871)
The American Civil War (1861-1865) has deeply affected the psyches of Cousin Effie and Edward; and as soon as I learned in my background reading that Carolus-Duran fought in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), I knew a shared experience of war could be an overt point of contact between him and Edward.  Read More 
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Parisian drawings

January 5, 2014
Tags: Paris landmark
Jules-Adolphe Chauvet, Tourelle at the corner of the rue du Temple (1870’s)
Blog tip! Today’s post at the invaluable Bibliodyssey blog is a portfolio of Parisian architectural drawings selected from the digitized Chauvet collection at the BnF’s Gallica site. The post provides information and links. To check it out, click here.
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Cluny

December 30, 2013
Tags: Jeanette, Paris landmark
Joseph Theodor Hansen, Interior Courtyard, Musée de Cluny (1881)
I spent a semester in France as an undergraduate. A visit to the Cluny that sophomore year fed my interest in the Middle Ages, later my field of specialization in graduate school. When I read that women art students in the 19th C valued the opportunity its enclosed gardens offered them to work outdoors unmolested, I knew I had to send Jeanette there. Read More 
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Romance in the Luxembourg Garden

December 26, 2013
Tags: Edward, Jeanette, Paris landmark, Sargent, cafes and restaurants, fashion or clothes, gardens, light
John Singer Sargent, In the Luxembourg Garden (1879)

From the time I started writing, Sargent’s painting of a couple strolling in the Luxembourg Garden was a key image for me. Edward and Jeanette. The fountain. The fashion silhouette of the woman’s dress (no bustle). Touches of red. Light. Read More 

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