Katherine Keenum

This painting was at the back of my mind for when I imagined a vineyard terraced below a limestone escarpment on the grounds of Dr. Aubanel’s sanatorium. Edward helps tend grapevines there in February 1880. It tickled me to discover in preparing this post that the picture was painted two years later in February 1882  Read More 

Sometimes interests converge. A recent post on The Gangs of Paris at the Victorian Paris blog sent me investigating the story-telling, tough-guy, tough-gal Danse Apache or Apache Dance (pronounced ah-PAHSH in both French and English), which originated in France and quickly moved to the American stage in 1908.  Read More 

Blog tip and request: At his highly informative website, Darren Rousar is making available an 1867 drawing manual, page by page as it is translated. Click here for details on the manual, its importance, and how you can help. Read More 

For my work-in-progress, I’ve been reading the autobiography of journalist Ida M. Tarbell, All in the Day’s Work. In 1892 for a McClure’s Magazine article, Tarbell interviewed the French archeologist and writer Jane Henriette Magre Dieulafoy, who with her husband Marcel worked on excavations in Persia.  Read More 

Blog tip: For a Cyrillic-alphabet blog post with several images of work by the Finnish artist Amélie Helga Lundhal (1850–1914), who studied at the Académie Julian and painted in Brittany, click here.

Originally, I meant for the Dolsons just to vanish. People do (or did before the internet) and Jeanette’s circle of friends in Paris must inevitably break apart. Novels, however, make demands their own. When I reread my almost completed  Read More 

Quickly, another not-really-empty room to compare to Anna Ancher’s. Again, a female figure is hardly more than a part of the color pattern, but, oh, to be reading with her in that room! For this and two more “It’s almost summer” paintings at the It’s About Time blog, click here.  Read More 

While I was working on the previous post, about Anna Ancher of the Skagen colony, I ran across an archived blog post on the Finnish painter, Elin Kleopatra Danielson-Gambogi (1861–1919). She was an almost exact contemporary of Jeanette and, after training in Finland, went to Paris and Pont Aven, where she became a follower of Jules Bastien-Lepage.  Read More 

Although a little girl is, in fact, shown sitting on a chair in this painting, it was one of the pictures I had in mind when I invented Jeanette’s interest in rooms as “portraits without people.” Anna Ancher, an almost exact contemporary of Jeanette,  Read More 

This is the painting I have a melancholy Jeanette copy in the Louvre after Edward has gone south to Dr. Aubanel’s sanatorium. It would obviously appeal to an artist who perceives empty rooms as “portraits without people.”

Samuel van Hoogstraten was  Read More