Katherine Keenum

Website tip: The Hammock: A Novel Based on the True Story of French Painter James Tissot is Lucy Paquette’s gorgeous, informative website devoted to her historical novel of the same title. The novel (which opens with a fictionalized version of the death of Regnault that Carolus rehearses to Edward) is an e-book that takes advantage of digital technology to include seventeen zoom-able paintings as illustrations. The website provides many, many more pictures by Tissot, his contemporaries, and the artists who influenced him. Go explore! Read More 

Falling back on favorite songs seems a natural way for people (especially students) to experience their emotions. When I was thinking about Jeanette’s loneliness during Edward’s absence in the winter of 1879–1880, I searched the Public Domain Music for a song for her to sing over and over to herself. What luck to find a melancholy, wistful one published in 1872 by a female songwriter, Charlotte Alington Barnard, the pseudonym of Claribel! It even fitted perfectly with Jeanette and Edward’s earlier romantic day by the Seine. Read More 

Website tip: I'm pleased to announce that this blog has been added to the Blogs by Poets & Writers" listings of the extremely informative website New Pages, which lives up to its motto, Engage Readers • Creative Writers • Start Here. Special thanks to Elaine Fowler Palencia for introducing me to the site. Read More 

Blog tip: For a slightly disconcerting view of the Salle des Maréchaux in the Tuileries Palace made from stereoscopic images taken in 1865, click here. Meissonier painted the ruins of this room in 1871, after the palace was burned. Read More 

While I was working on Where the Light Falls, my husband and I visited this mental hospital in Arles. The courtyard has been restored to look much as it did when van Gogh was a patient. The  Read More 

Blog tip: It's hard to know for sure what ordinary people wore for everyday work in the past because only fine clothes tend to be saved. For a thoughtful post on the problem by a writer of historical romance, click here.

Last week, I had the privilege of privately visiting the library at Edith Wharton’s house in Lenox, Massachusetts, The Mount, where Nynke Dorhout, the librarian, showed me (among many other treasures) Wharton’s own first-edition copies of The House of Mirth (1905).  Read More 

Working from the photographs, paintings, and—best of all for my purposes—elevation plans, plant lists, and a bird’s-eye layout in Derek Fell’s book Renoir’s Garden, I used Renoir’s estate, Les Collettes, near Cagnes to invent Dr. Aubanel’s  Read More 

In the Bible, it is Mary Magdalene who first witnesses the Risen Christ (John 20:14–17). She mistakes for him a gardener until he reveals his true identity, whereupon he tells her not to touch him yet (“Noli me tangere” in the Vulgate Latin).  Read More 

Blog tip: In my fiction, I stay away from religion except for the externals, e.g., glances at my characters’ church attendance and Christmas. In recognition of the solemnity of Good Friday, however, I’m posting these studies as a reminder that artists have been drawn to religious topics throughout the ages. I first ran across the image in the archives of the Inspirational Artwork blog, which are worth exploring. Read More