Katherine Keenum

Yesterday, I attended an absorbing webinar on Boston artist Sarah Gooll Putnam. Every aspect of the topic interested me (see below), and I hope it will be posted to YouTube as planned. For this blog, it introduces one more excellent, little-known woman artist. Putnam was a successful portraitist in Boston elite circles, painting in a style reminiscent of John Singer Sargent and Cecilia Beaux.

An even bigger Wow! for the historical novelist are her voluminous diaries now digitized at the Massachusetts Historical Society. In them, she recorded daily events, illustrated her entries with drawings, and supplemented them with clippings and other memorabilia. If you have a hankering to undertake a story set in Boston in the latter quarter of the 19th C or early 20th, don't miss these.

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Horrors! Steampunk facial recognition? Mannequin mind control? Bizarre external sensory systems? Pursuing Rachel powder a little further, I came across this Max Factor Beauty Calibrator at Cosmetics and skin: "Developed in 1932 it was supposed to measure how far a person's features differed from the 'ideal face.'" Surely, the time has come for it to inspire a sci-fi tale, preferably feminist revenge. Or, oh no, wait, historical fiction?????

After reading my post on Rachel powder, a friend told me about playing with her mother's and aunts' cosmetics when she was a little girl. She had a hazy memory of seeing something labeled Rachel. That sent me back to the internet, and voilà, more information about Elizabeth Arden products and the company's history here and here. What useful details for fiction set in the 20th C! My old editor at Berkley thought I should set Anonymity in a more glamorous industry than publishing. I sarcastically queried, such as interior decorating? Good idea! she said.

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Website alert: I've just discovered Thornfield Hall, review after review of the kind of books I love. For instance, I'd been wondering whether to read Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future (2020). Now I will. And it's good to be reminded of older books. Rumer Godden's The Greengage Summer (1958) is on my shelf and just moved up on my to-reread list. Hooray!

Double blog alert: A snazzy, modern, digitally recreated tour of ancient Rome's center and a lovely, still, 19th C watercolor of the Colosseum in ruins. By chance I came upon them one after the other, and what layers of period and media they encapsulate! First, I watched a trailer for Rome in 3D at the History Blog. Next came this 19th C watercolor of the ruined Colosseum at Gurney Journey's announcement The Rijksmuseum shares copyright-free images. Yeah, they link to time sinks, but also to a world of information and inspiration.

A day after hitting Rachel, what should I come across but "Isabella-coloured clothes." Back to the Oxford English Dictionary: "Greyish yellow; light buff," with a first citation to an inventory of Queen Elizabeth's wardrobe in 1600. The word is now used mostly of dogs and horses, but the sample shown here is one tile in a chart by Tadelakt, a company that sells waterproof plaster. For an article on canine genetics that includes pictures of Isabella-colored dogs, click here. For the Wikipedia article on Isabella/Isabelline, click here. How to use it in fiction? Maybe as in-joke, a pair of cats named Rachel and Isabella.

Blog post alert: Tuesday's word of the day at the OED was rachel (or Rachel), defined as a "light tan colour (originally and chiefly as a shade of face powder)," with a first citation in 1880. Whoa! wait! what? A quick search landed me at Colour Cards. Bingo. The post has pictures of various 20th C color charts, including several for cosmetics, and a link to the website's own account of actress Rachel Félix, whose complexion reportedly gave the face powder its name. I suspect writers of historical romances have used Rachel poudre a-plenty, but it's new to me—and comes with a story. Yea.

A cache of old letters. Research to uncover a secret or reconstruct a life. Narration of the search itself. These are the familiar elements of fiction from Henry James's The Aspern Papers to modern novels like The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish. Novelist, short-story writer, and poet, Elaine Fowler Palencia didn't invent such a story; she lived it. The result is On Rising Ground, her narrative of the life of one ordinary man and his experience as a private in the Confederate Army. Ostensibly narrow in focus, it is also wide in scope and written in response to the questions a novelist as well as a family historian would ask.

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In November, I bought the new 25th Anniversary edition of Philip Pullman's Northern Lights for its woodcut illustrations by Chris Wormell. The book was a Christmas present to myself, which I saved for reading after New Year's Day. I'm finding that it does indeed enhance the reading to turn the page to a spectacular illustration like the one shown here. (As it happens, Wormell's color palette is reflected in a fascinating post at Gurney Journey on Polar Stratospheric Clouds.)

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Blog post alert: While the nation is going through hell (with hopes of better days to come, whether paradisiacal or merely purgatorial), it's a timely happenstance that the Uffizi Gallery in Florence has digitized a set of 16th C illustrations of all three books of Dante's Commedia. Read the History Blog's Rarely-seen Dante illustrations digitized for more information and links.