Katherine Keenum

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.

Exhibition alert: I've just learned about Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900–1939 from an article in the Autumn 2024 issue of American Scholar: Reborn in the City of Light. The show, which is up through February 23, 2025, is built around portraits of American women who found freedom to explore their art, beliefs, and sexuality in Paris in the early 20th C. They didn't necessarily know each other; but together they illustrate a time and place. Naturally, for this post, I chose a painting from my magic year of 1908. Ethel Mars, moreover, is new to me and I hope to explore her life and work in future—possibly in the exhibition catalogue if it becomes available in our library system!

Website alert: An article in the Guardian, Tate Britain acquires first painting by pioneering English female artist overlooked for a century, brought to my attention Louise Jopling again. As an artist and suffragist, she is definitely someone my Palmer characters, Jeanette and Mattie, would know about! And wouldn't the show at the Tate gratify them? For more of Jopling's work, click here.

Image in the Public Domain via Wikipedia

Blog post alert: Another female artist new to me! Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema was trained in London by her husband, the artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema. She had work exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878. (Had I known in time, I might have had Jeanette see it!). Many of her paintings could illustrate or inspire stories. This one of her stepdaughter Laurense's tea party? Maybe not, but I think it's sweet and the touch of Japonisme fits with things I've been looking at lately.  You can see more of her work at Wikipedia Commons and read more about her marriage to a fellow artist here.

Blog post alert: Charley Parker's Eye Candy for Today: Louise Jopling domestic scene brought Louise Jane (née Goode) Jopling to my attention. She was an older contemporary of Jeanette's who studied art in Paris and became a suffragist. Just get this poem she wrote in my magical year of 1908!

 Read More 

Here in the Berkshires, as the days shorten, we face cold rain and a first frost, which certainly means a book beside the fire appeals! Florence Ada Fuller was an Australian artist, a slightly younger contemporary of the real Jeanette Smith. Like my fictional Jeanette Palmer, she studied at the Académie Julian with William-Adolphe Bouguereau. I didn't know of her until I ran across a post at My Daily Art Display. It's always a pleasure to discover a new artist, and Fuller is a reminder that Australia is a whole continent to explore. Where to start? How about Australian Impressionism?

Art historian Christine Guth has alerted me to the time Lilla Cabot Perry spent in Japan, beginning in 1897. Perry, whose style was much influenced by Claude Monet's Impressionism painted as many as thirty-five pictures of Mount Fuji, but this intimate, domestic scene of a woman showing a picture book to two little girls seems to me more likely to inspire a story.

It's interesting that the child in the middle stares out as if at a camera. That might suggest an awareness of a fourth person in the room. Perry? a narrator? another character? Turn it around: what might the painting suggest about a Western artist in Japan at the turn of the 20th C?

 Read More 

An article, Ukrainian Painters: The Modern, led me to Oleksandra Ekster, whose participation in the Modernist movement at the beginning of the 20th C is clear in her works. She either reflected or helped shape a number of avant-garde styles. A summary of her career, found at the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv, points out that she "educated a whole generation of the theatrical design innovators …who contributed to the development of Ukrainian theatre in the 1920s." And it is the theatricality of this Carnival in Venice that strikes me, both in the flatness of background buildings and the Commedia dell'arte costumes.

 Read More 

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?