Katherine Keenum

 
Oddly enough, I remembered this watercolor as "Lady Pole in Her Library." Nope, the artist was Thomas Pole, an American transplant to Bristol, England, a doctor and Quaker preacher—no titled lady involved. Still, you know me: it's all about using images to prompt story ideas. And quiet as it is, In the Library has some suggestive clues.

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Man, had I forgotten this one! But I see why I saved it. A 19th C artist, his studio, a lay figure, mirror images, picture frames—so much to linger over. An art-appreciation teacher might point to the way verticals and diagonals direct the eye, or the way the lighting picks out the gilding and that impressive mechanical figure. But what attracts a writer? What stories does His Favorite Model suggest?

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Frankly, recent news for women, workers, minorities, and democracy has been largely discouraging. Still, let's buck each other up and remember the struggle is long. Happy Labor Day!

Via the National Archives.

Another image I have run across as I review my files is this one from Farm Crops in Britain. I love models and diagrams and illustrations that can help me visualize settings within a story. This page, for instance, is packed with information about walls and buildings and activities for a farm in stony country. I tucked it away for reference; but in addition, Stanley Roy Badmin was a pleasant illustrator and landscape artist. I'm glad I discovered him—and have now rediscovered him!

In the dreaded process of preparing to buy a new computer, I am trying to clear out old files and links—and, of course, being distracted by coming across images and texts I had saved but forgotten about. Emblematic case in point: Maid reading in a library.

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Blog post alert: Audrey Munson, Artists' Muse at Gurney Journey is a post on the career of a professional model in New York City during the early 20th C. It has several pictures and links to longer coverage. In brief: she posed for Beaux-Arts sculptors, appeared nude in a 1915 movie about a model, lived to be 104, and spent half her life in an insane asylum. I don't think she has figured in any historical fiction, but she sure could!
Image via Wikipedia Commons

I have now visited the Nikolai Astrup: Visions of Norway show at the Clark twice, once with no prior preparation and once after reading the catalogue. To prepare for a third visit, I have begun reading Pavel Machotka's Cézanne: Landscape into Art in hopes of discovering useful ways of thinking about the paintings; for Astrup's deeply felt response to his native landscape remind me of Cezanne's. What Machotka unexpectedly gave me, too, was a way of thinking about a story I've been working on.

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Blog post alert: Something I would never have thought of: jotting down quick sketches—graphic or verbal—of what you see in the background while watching television series. Kathleen Jennings did. Read her post on TV Sketching—Backgrounds. Then try it!

As a follow-up to my last post on carte-de-visite albums, here's a German lady holding an album of somewhat larger photos. The photographer, Bertha Wehnert-Beckmann, would be worth exploring in depth as possibly the first female professional photographer. For German speakers, the place to start: A German Lady.

A cousin recently turned up a family carte-de-visite album among her mother's things. I knew about the little photographic calling cards that people used to collect and exchange. They were invented—and patented—by a Paris photographer, Andre Adolphe Eugene Disdéri, and I had looked at individual examples of famous people when I was researching Where the Light Falls. What I didn't know was that soon after Disdéri's invention, someone invented albums with framed pockets into which you could slip your collection and keep adding. Old albums with annotations, like those in the Sturgis-Codman album, would be a wonderful resource for seeing the relations among friends and family or the interests of a collector. Historical fiction writers and family historians, happy hunting!