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

An article in the Guardian, Discovered: a lost possible inspiration for Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, describes this painting by her sister, Vanessa Bell, which will viewed in public for the first time in sixty years when it goes on view at Sotheby's in London in November. Vanessa gave the picture to Virginia just as the writer was beginning to draft her novel, Mrs. Dalloway. It's tempting to some—and makes for good marketing—to assume that the painting helped Virginia visualize the party as she wrote. But there's no proof, and it certainly isn't necessary. Readers, moreover, are free to rely solely on Woolf's words and their own imaginations. Still, it will be an interesting experiment, don't you think, to read or reread the novel with this image in mind?

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.

I've just been introduced by our Western Massachusetts public library system to Astrid Sheckels and her Hector Fox books. I can't tell you how delighted I was to come across Ebenezer Moose, shown here, in Hector Fox and the Giant Quest! For many years, my husband and I vacationed at a lake in Maine, where we almost always saw at least one moose and especially loved spotting them in remote marshes. Sheckels' evocation of that landscape is evocative.

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A sentence on p. 4 of the Spring 2024 issue of Almanac caught my attention: "Charlotte Randall, a mother of six, was a photographer in the small town of Clyde, Ohio." A woman making a living as a photographer for the cartes-de-visite so popular in the latter half of the 19th C? Whoo-hoo! Of course, I knew about female art photographers from Julia Margaret Cameron to Gertrude Käsebier, but women in the ordinary, everyday commercial world offers something new area to explore. One place to start is a Wikipedia Timelime of women in photography. Another is the article Zooming in on the places where early women photographers could build a career. And right off the bat, fiction writers, what do you make of these two midcentury women with the daguerreotype camera? Just look at those facial expressions!

Image via Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Are you drawn to topics in fiction? I tend to like novels in which a house is a major character. I'm also drawn to fiction written by British women during the Second World War—not historical fiction set during the war, but novels written for the home front while the outcome of the war was very much in doubt (Angela Thirkell's Cheerfulness Breaks In ends with a major character at Dunkirk and his wife unsure whether he has survived). To my great joy, I've just discovered Henrietta's War and Henrietta Makes It Through by Joyce Dennys. What's more, Dennys is a female artist new to me. Almost too good to be true!

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Although Lilias Trotter studied informally with John Ruskin, she probably thought of herself primarily as a missionary, not as an artist. Yet no one can paint with her flair without its meaning a lot to her. In other words, like many multi-talented people with strong callings, Trotter was complex. Personally, I dislike fictionalized biographies. Secondary and walk-on parts for real people in historical fiction? Of course. But it takes chutzpah to pretend to "bring them to life" as central characters. Still, if discovering someone like Lilias Trotter prompts a wholly fictional character to emerge in my imagination and demand that her story to be told, won't I be grateful!

Image via James Gurney. For a website devoted to her, click here.

Website alert: In my current fantasy novella, I have reached a point where I need to describe a votive figurine, so I went on line to look at images for inspiration. What did I find? Fidelma Massey! Her Shrine for the Mother of Birds doesn't fit my narrative; but, wow! do I admire her sculptures. If you like this sort of thing, do explore her website.

Television advertisements often involve short narratives. Print ads can carry implicit stories, too. This one for Thomson's Glove Fitting Corset is full of delicious details for an imaginary 19th C female artist. The window overlooking rooftops, the geranium on the sill, the rough wooden wall, the propped-up canvas on the left. Ah, Bohemia. But the fancy overhead lamp, the potted plant, the bow at the artist's neck, her hair: Ah, fashion. And the circlet with a crescent moon on the sculpture's head: Diana! What to make of it all?

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