Katherine Keenum

One of the gee-whiz pleasures for me in researching New York City at the turn of the 20th C is gawking at high-resolution photos on line. In the full view of this one at the Shorpy site, you can read ads on the El staircase and titles on the newsstand. I'm delighted with the  Read More 

Breaking news: This portrait, privately owned by the same family for a hundred years, has sold for a record $65,000,000. Not what it would have brought in 1881!

Of course, this should have been posted on Monday with an exhortation to vote (I hope you did). If you find the results of Tuesday's elections depressing, remember our foremothers worked and worked and kept working despite.

The Library of Congress captions this photograph, "Miss Louise Hall with brush and Miss Susan Fitzgerald assisting bill posting in Cincinnati."  Read More 

In the first draft of a chapter in ANONYMITY, I had a meeting of my suffragist group break up around 7:00 P.M. and wrote that it was still light outside. Before beginning the next chapter, which would follow Mattie home on the streets of Manhattan, I wanted to firm up the novel’s chronology.  Read More 

Blog tip: Somewhere I read about American art students in Paris carving caricatures at Hallowe'en. I wanted to include a scene in which Jeanette and her friends carved turnips to look like their teachers, but it didn't fit dramatically. This picture—from a post at That Devil History—illustrates how really creepy the original jack o' lanterns were and something of what is involved in carving them. Happy Hallowe'en! Read More 

Edgar Degas once said, "Conversation in real life is full of half-finished sentences and overlapping talk. Why shouldn't painting be too?" Look at the partially lifted curtain in the background and the men hanging around on stage in middle and foreground. Don't  Read More 

Having read that Hungarian restaurants were among the first ethnic restaurants in New York to attract customers outside their own community, I’ve sent Mattie and her lover to one early in ANONYMITY. For the fun of it, I tried to find images of one in 1908. Lo and behold, this photograph! It shows  Read More 

Blog tip: Corsets exercise the modern mind. Why did they WEAR them??? A revealing answer, a myth-busting answer (oh, the puns are endless) and more important a good look at how a corset affects the look of clothes is offered by The Pragmatic Costumer here. Read More 

At one point when I thought Jeanette might try to earn money to pay for her art lessons, I considered sending her to a porcelain factory to paint vases as the men in Dammouse’s picture are shown doing. An echo of that theme lingers in the porcelain manufacturer from Limoges who attends the  Read More 

Swedish artist Eva Bonnier accompanied Hanna Hirsch to Paris in 1883.* Bonnier was primarily a painter; but like my characters, Amy Richardson and Sonja Borealska, she practiced sculpture in clay. Read More