For the full on-line edition of Old French Fairy Tales with Sterrett's illustrations, click here. Read More
Picturing a World
People and animals
For the full on-line edition of Old French Fairy Tales with Sterrett's illustrations, click here. Read More
American Women Artists: 1860–1960
Elizabeth O'Neill Verner
What we see is partly a result of what we are taught to see. Elizabeth O'Neill Verner must have encountered the kind of 19th C paintings of flower sellers that have been the topic at It’s About Time in recent weeks. My guess is that familiarity with the motif contributed to her noticing and championing the flower sellers and basket weavers in her own town of Charleston, S.C. A move was afoot in the early 20th C to have these African-American vendors banned from the street, but Verner led the effort Read More
Asta Nørregaard
I saw this painting by the Norwegian painter Asta Nørregaard at an exhibition while I was researching Where the Light Falls. At the time, I was unable to find an image on line, but memory of it influenced how I imagined Jeanette’s first studio of her own. Its spareness and gray walls, in contrast to the lusher studios so often depicted during this period, seemed specially appropriate to Jeanette’s pocketbook and her mood at that point in the novel. At the time I was writing, I thought that it was Cousin Effie’s love of Whistler’s decorative schemes at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1878 that made her to want to paint the walls yellow; I suspect now that the colors in this painting also subtly influenced my imagination of how the two characters would react to a studio space. Read More
Anna Ancher’s flower arrangers
Emma Lambert Cooper
Lee Lufkin Kaula
Although Kaula seems to be best known for paintings Read More