Katherine Keenum

When characters become a part of your life, associations continue to attract your attention even after a book is finished. I had an e-mail today from a friend who is spending the summer in Bandol, France. The Riviera now makes me think of Carolus-Duran and how much he loved the Mediterranean. He had a villa at Saint-Aygulf and donated two paintings to the local chapel. For more (in French), click here. Read More 

After rereading a couple of chapters of ANONYMITY, my work-in-progress, I took a break by Googling images related to women's suffrage. This one popped up without any documentation, but for my purposes, that didn't matter. What I love are the candid smiles and sense of motion. Just what I need to make me feel I'm back in a living, breathing time. Read More 

Blog tip: Sunday post at the always interesting Lines and Colors, sent me to Spanish painter Ramon Casas, who studied with
Carolus-Duran at about the  Read More 

Website tip: The YA novelist Polly Shulman pointed me to Monovision’s selection of early 20th C photographs of Bohemian Greenwich Village taken by Jessie Talbox Beals. Having finished my fantasy novel, I’m plunging back into ANONYMITY. Thank you, Polly! Read More 

As I confess from time to time, I am working on a novel set in an imaginary high fantasy world that draws on my medieval training. My heroine has a sailboat, which she sails single-handed. Neither she nor it looks like this, and yet it cheered me immensely this afternoon to stumble across the image. Writers, whatever feeds the imagination! Read More 

Always on the lookout for women artists who were working during the time period of my new novel, ANONMITY, I was pleased this morning to stumble across Clara Miller Burd (1873–1933). She was born in New York City, studied art there and in Paris, and  Read More 

My husband is transcribing 19th C correspondence at the American Antiquarian Society as a volunteer project. In his last batch of letters, he found two from Frederick Arthur Bridgman to one of the lenders who helped  Read More 

Website tip: Today's post of images from Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Charles Pugin's Microcosm of London at the always interesting blog, Spitalsfield Life, is a dandy for historical fiction novelists and fans of Georgian England. And I love the way this plate shows early 19th C lighting for a life class. Read More 

Website tip: Blue Interior by artist Harriet Backer is featured on today’s Lines and Colors. I have shown here another of her interiors, a Breton kitchen, that I wish I had known when I was writing Where the Light Falls. Not only does it illustrate the Gernagans’ kitchen, it fits perfectly with Jeanette’s motif of rooms as “portraits without people.” Read More 

Readers of this blog know that I'm always on the lookout for pictures that illustrate Where the Light Falls. Jeanette specially notices the size of Carolus-Duran's palette when she first see him painting Cornelia Renick's portrait—et voilà!