Katherine Keenum

There are struggling Bohemian artists and then there are the fashionistas. This sketch of Hanna Hirsch-Pauli by Eva Bonnier shows what the well-dressed art student wore to the all-important Paris Salon in the mid 1880s.
Image via 19thc-artworldwide.org

Article alert: Artists' diaries and correspondence were treasure troves when I was researching Where the Light Falls. I always specially loved pages on which the writer had included little sketches. How I wish A City of One's Own: The Parisian Letters of the Swedish Painter Hanna Hirsch-Pauli had been available to me then! No matter, the topic of women artists in Paris remains fascinating; and this article not only furthers scholarly understanding, but may well enrich someone else's historical fiction.

Well, I first added this image to my collection of paintings that give an idea of how much light was available at night before the advent of electricity. Now it seems like an emblem of how most of us are handling the election: withdrawing from the darkness into what little light we can find in reading and the company of friends. For more about the artist and the painting, see Hanna Hirsch-Pauli: Friendship Goals and Feminism in the 19th-Century Stockholm.

Blog post alert: This portrait by Hanna Hirsch-Pauli of sculptor, Jenni Lagerberg tickled me by its Japonisme, the mischievous look in the subject's eye, and those sleeves! The sleeves helped me date the picture to around 1895, thanks to a well-illustrated post, Sleeve Shifts of the 1890s at Historical Sewing.com. Its author, Jennifer Rosbrugh, makes the point that fashion ideas are sometimes taken to an extreme over a short period of time and then disappear—which is what happened with puffed sleeves.

A post on a pastel portrait by the Norwegian artist, Asta Nørregaard, led me to an article, Revisiting Asta Nørregaard in the Studio, by Carina Rech, which contains a great deal of information about the artist and provides examples of her work. Among them is this self-portrait, painted in Paris, when Nørregaard was working on a commissioned altarpiece. While working on that painting (just visible on the easel to the left), she had moved into a new studio and wrote a friend about having to adjust to the new lighting. You can see how much light was on her mind from the way it slants through the window and illuminates her palette and her own right side. The painting strikes me as very concrete, yet mystical; a picture of solitude and dedication, of self-assurance and of questioning. Although it can supply details to the historical novelist, it's too good to try to turn into a story.

We had to put our beloved Corgi down in November, but we have left his outdoor water dish for the birds and chipmunks who visit it from time to time. I hasten to add that our Palmer slept in OUR house, not a doghouse. All the same this picture made me smile wistfully. As for the artist, I can find little about Elisabeth Sinding (1846–1930) except that she was a Norwegian who studied in Christiana (now Oslo), Dresden, and Munich. No thought, no suggestion: sometimes a picture is enough.

I have posted before about Danish artist, Bertha Wegmann (here and here). Today's link is to a Lines and Colors post that provides more of her work—including this autumnal landscape, which fits the views in New England these days. Enjoy!

Ottilia Adelborg (1855–1936) is another of the Scandinavian female artists who was an almost exact contemporary of the real (and the fictional!) Jeanette. She studied at the Swedish Royal Academy at the same time Jeanette was in Paris and may have studied in France later herself. She became a children's book writer and illustrator. The English-language edition of her Clean Peter is available online.
 
She also illustrated other writer's books, such as The Wonderful Adventure of Nils Holgersson by Selma Lagerlöf, for which this watercolor is a preliminary design. I haven't read the Lagerlöf book (which is available in a new translation), but this picture of a daydreaming boy and a tiny figure climbing out of the chest could suggest a story just by itself, don't you think? Or prompt a poem about the nature of imagination?
 

Anna Nordgren—another Scandinavian female artist who studied first at the Académie Julian and then with Carolus-Duran! She was in Paris at just the time the real Jeanette or my fictional character could have known her. She even exhibited at the Salon of 1879, which plays a part in Where the Light Falls. If I had known Lady in a Train Window when I was first researching the novel, I wonder how it might have shaped my imagination?

How I wish I had known Interior of a Studio in Paris by Eva Bonnier when I was writing about Sonja at work in Where the Light Falls! I have seen 19th C photographs of sculptors' studios and their works-in-progress. Photographs are excellent sources for historical details and accuracy. But as David Hockney often reminds us, the camera does not see what the human eye sees. Oil painting, moreover, has a tenderness and tactility all its own—even in digital reproduction!
 
Eva Bonnier is new to me, a Swedish contemporary of the real Jeanette. You can read more about her and her place among the Scandinavian artists who studied in Paris in the well-illustrated article, The context of Anders Zorn's paintings in Sweden.