Katherine Keenum

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 

Blog tips for writers: I respond strongly to places and imagining settings is important to me in writing fiction. Recently I began saving photographs from the British Geograph website with first lines for stories I might write some day. In one of life’s weird coincidences, I’ve just run across a couple of posts at the Steamed: Writing Steampunk Fiction blog Read More 

To make a world real, it seems to me you have to know what people ate and where and when. When the Duval restaurants turned up early in my research I knew I could use them; and Renoir's painting of a Duval waitress became a touchstone image for me. Not only the quietly respectable young woman but the figured wallpaper and curtains suggested a feminine air that would be reassuring to Jeanette and Effie.

Pierre Louis Duval, a butcher, began selling servings of a meat cooked in broth to workers ca. 1855. From this venture grew a chain of restaurants. They were clean, well-run places where women on a budget could eat safely.  Read More 

Blog tip: I’m exploring a blog new to me, Poul Webb’s Art & Artists. Its posts on individual artists are illustrated by many images. This one comes from a post on early John Singer Sargent and demonstrates Sargent’s ease and his unconventional cropping. Jeanette notices both when she sees his sketch of Mrs. Renick. It also illustrates the awareness of flesh that she must take for granted in her class for the nude despite the way it upsets Effie and disquiets Edward. Read More 

When Jeanette and Amy take up the full nude at the Académie Julian in the fall of 1879, they have taken informal anatomy lessons from Wee Willie Winkham, based on the skeleton he owns as a medical student. Know the Skeleton, a recent post at  Read More 

Web tip: At her website, artist Jane Morris has a very interesting essay on the Vermeer Project that she conducted with her students. She describes building a camera obscura, investigating its use, and exploring problems that arose. With illustrations. Read More 

I’d be surprised if many people on first sight of this drawing thought ‘Oh that must be Rudyard Kipling’. We’re much more used to photographs of him bald and spectacled, taken later in his life. In fact, this pencil drawing is the only image of  Read More 

Tomorrow, I am lucky enough to have a guest post from Mary Hamer, author of the prize-winning historical novel, Kipling & Trix. Did you know that Rudyard Kipling had a sister who also wrote fiction? He did. Check here tomorrow to learn more about how Mary used images, including a rare photograph of "Trix" to visualize the two title characters of her fascinating novel.  Read More 

Web tip: Thanks to Polly Shulman for steering me to Fashioning History, a chronological database of portraits from prehistory to the 1930’s. To illustrate the sort of thing that can be found there, I chose this portrait by Charles Courtney Curran, because he was Jeanette’s contemporary and studied at the Académie Julian. Also because Polly and I like hats. Read More 

As a follow-up to my last post, here’s a quick look ahead at naughty behavior in New York City in 1908, the setting for my current work-in-progress. I came across Robert Henri’s portrait of the dancer Mademoiselle Voclezca in a 1995 exhibition catalogue, Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York. More astonishing to me than the painting were several paragraphs about a craze for “Salome dancers.”  Read More