Katherine Keenum

Look at what I just came across! I had not seen this image when I wrote Where the Light Falls, but I can’t resist posting it. It belongs with Jeanette and Effie’s first arrival in Paris, when Effie pays the driver of their fiacre a tip or pourboire, but let’s assume that Edward and Eddie rode to the zoo in a fiacre. Read More 

When Edward takes his nephew Eddie to the Parisian zoo, the Jardin d'Acclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne, they see an ostrich pulling a cart. Although I had read about the ostrich, I had never seen a picture of it until I ran across Abroad. Illustrated by Thomas Crane (1808–1859), father of the far more famous illustrator Walter Crane (1845–1915), it follows an English family across the Channel and through France. Abroad conveys how a visitor in a foreign country finds that everything looks new and different. Read More 

In Manet's potent Rue Mosnier, the flags are hung out to celebrate France's repayment of war reparations to Germany. The one-legged man who hobbles down the empty street has paid a different price for the Franco-Prussian War. The painting moved me, and I translated it obliquely into the scene where Edward shares a glass of brandy with a veteran. Later, he finds it impossible to put into words why the chance meeting mattered to him, but it did. Likewise, I find it impossible to put into words why the scene matters to me, but it does. I lived in fear that a reader or editor would call for it to be cut. Thank goodness, it went uncontested. Read More 

Jeanette Palmer is fictional; but one of the masters at the Académie Julian, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, fostered the career of a real American woman, Elizabeth Jane Gardner, whom eventually he married as his second wife. Click here for his portrait of her, which was also painted in 1879.

Is it my imagination, or does his self-portrait reveal a sadness and sensitivity unexpected in a painter of marzipan nudes and sentimental children? In any case, besides using him to dramatize the teaching methods employed at the time, I wanted the novel to portray the esteem with which he was held by his students. The touch of red on his collar is the much-coveted badge indicating membership in the Legion of Honor. Read More 

The models in some late 19th C photographs contort their bodies, demonstrating what they could do. Others flaunt their sexuality, perhaps from pride, perhaps on orders from the photographer. The weary resignation in this model's face says worlds about how hard and unglamorous the work actually was. In my novel, the model nicknamed La Grecque, has a fiery personality; but this picture influenced me very much in thinking about her. Just as actors often tell themselves back stories in order to inhabit a character more fully in performance, writers must know more about their characters than makes it to the page. Yet I have never forgotten what another novelist once told me, "I feel I must allow them some privacy, too." La Grecque froze me out, but that stubborn defense of her private self became part of what I could tell.

Fan fiction writers, do you prefer to take a minor character and go off in a new direction, or do you prefer sequels and prequels? Do you see a story here? Read More 

Anyone researching women students at the Académie Julian comes up against Countess Marie Bashkirtseff from the get-go. Besides a self-portrait, she painted a picture, In the Studio of a women's class and kept a voluminous diary in which she recorded her drama-queen feelings, studio gossip, and lots of concrete particulars about what went on in the classes. Talented, vain about her looks, ambitious, and far from tactful, she attracted devoted followers but also provoked many of her classmates, some of whom rallied behind another star at the school, Louise Breslau. I suppose it was a detractor who produced this cartoon! Read More 

Rodolphe Julian brags to Jeanette on the size of his school's collection of costumes. As I wrote, I was aware of American illustrators, e.g., Abbey, and imagined a future for Jeanette in that field.

For a contemporary illustrator's explanation of why actual costumes are important and tips on how to make or obtain them, click here. Read More 

It may be unromantic on Valentine's Day, but what I love about this self-portrait is Anna Bilinska-Bohdanowicz's straightforward gaze, no-nonsense hair, and that apron. Admittedly, the dress is not really what you'd wear in the studio, not without a painter's smock to cover it fully. Still, there is no doubt that she wants you to think of her as a working artist. In different measures, I transferred her attitude to Amy and Sonja.

She was a student at the Académie Julian. For more information about her, click here. Read More 

I can't resist an out-of-sequence post. A website has just come to my attention that helps wonderfully in visualizing the gold room that James MacNeil Whistler decorated for the 1878 World's Fair, the room that so overwhelms Cousin Effie. The post for February 14, 2013, at Britain's National Trust blog, Treasure Hunt, concerns "The Peacock Room," designed in London by Whistler in 1876. Even that short post provides a glimpse Whistler's decorative taste. Best of all for Where the Light Falls, it alerted me to The Story of the Beautiful, a website that includes a virtual tour of the Peacock Room as it was first installed in London and later in Detroit. Visit and then use your imagination to create a room at the World's Fair! Read More 

This photo gives an idea of how many women crowded into Rodolphe Julian's highly successful art classes, and the drawings mounted on the wall shows how good the best of them were. Notice how they are posed so that not everyone is staring straight ahead at the canera. That was a 19th C convention for group photographs. It is artificial, but it does enliven the composition—just a little prod toward the historical novelist's goal of imagining them as separate individuals, each with her own story.

For Jefferson David Chalfant's informative painting of one of the men's studios, click here.  Read More