1. I take no credit for the Metropolitan Museum's decision to show the works. In the past the museum has hung an occasional Stettheimer painting in exhibitions of their permanent collection. However, since the publicity brought about by the publication of the monograph and the Whitney exhibition, the frequency and prominence with which museums across the country exhibit Stettheimer's works have dramatically increased.

2. I was fortunate that Robert Ferris Thompson and Skip Gates were teaching at Yale and I was able to sit in on lectures and seminars in the company of fellow graduate students Judith Wilson and Richard Powell. All influenced my subsequent work.

3. My work in African American art, with its implications of “otherness,” initially led me to explore Charles Demuth's poster-portraits as a dissertation topic—the artist was both male and homosexual, and the work centered on the significant figures of American modernism. Concurrently I was also considering Thomas Eakins's images of women, again because I was interested in the notion of looking through another's eyes at difference. The idea of male artists capturing images of women was intriguing. When I saw Stettheimer's work, however, it quickly proved the most absorbing and irresistible topic. Her paintings were enigmatic and transgressive in terms of how American modernism had been defined in my studies to date. In addition, researching a woman artist appealed to me, particularly one who, in her caustic wit and her struggle to balance personal and professional life, reminded me of my Austrian grandmother. Once I began my Stettheimer research, however, her work and life proved so complex that I soon discarded such superficial comparisons.

4. For example, in N.E. Lahti's Plain Talk about Art (Brooklyn, N.Y.: York Books, 1988), 84, modernism is defined as “the theory of Modern Art rejecting past styles.”

5. Nancy K. Miller, introduction to Writing a Woman's Life, by Caroline Heilbrun (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988), 11.

6. Stettheimer and O'Keeffe were the only women artists whose work was included in the 1938 exhibition of American art organized by the Museum of Modern Art to travel to the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris. It was the first ex

7. Most notably Linda Nochlin in her article “Florine Stettheimer: Rococo Subversive,” Art in America 68 (September 1980): 64–83, reprinted in Florine Stettheimer, Manhattan Fantastica, ed. Barbara J. Bloemink and Elizabeth Sussman (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1995). In 1976 the artist Barbara Zucker wrote about Stettheimer's work in “An Autobiography of Visual Poems,” Art News 76 (February 1977): 68–73.

8. In writing about the life of the artist, an interesting problem arose: How to avoid the trivializing use of her first name? All three Stettheimer sisters were artists in their own right, and they lived together for at least the first fifty years of their lives. How, then, to distinguish between Florine Stettheimer the painter and designer, Ettie Stettheimer the novelist, and Carrie Stettheimer the hostess and dollhouse maker, not to mention their mother, Rosetta, or their other siblings? Finally, I used the American painter Charles Peale's family as a model. Although I tried to use Stettheimer's last name as often as possible, on occasion, for clarity, I was forced to use her first name.

9. Ettie Stettheimer, introduction to Crystal Flowers, by Florine Stettheimer (New York: privately printed, 1949), unpaginated.

10. Stettheimer, untitled poem in Crystal Flowers. Handwritten versions of the poems in this book, with some revisions, are in the Stettheimer Papers at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

11. Ibid.

12. The Katonah Museum of Art is located about 50 miles north of Manhattan. George King was then director of the museum. I remain grateful to him and to Katherine Moore and Athena Kimball for their efforts on behalf of the exhibition.

13. Quotation from 1994 letter to the author from the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art. It is worth noting that later that same year the Whitney mounted a major retrospective with a monographic catalogue on Stettheimer's male contemporary Joseph Stella. In its organization, catalogue, and orientation, the Stella exhibition was very similar to monographic/retrospective exhibitions the museum had organized earlier on Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and Arthur Dove—again, all male contemporaries of Stettheimer. It is also telling that the National Gallery in Washington, and not the Whitney, organized the retrospective exhibition of Stettheimer's only significant female contemporary, Georgia O'Keeffe.

14. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman's Life, 50.

15. With permission of the head librarian, I was able to sort through the dolls, separate them into the two different productions, and wrap them in less

16. Letter from Georgia O'Keeffe to Florine Stettheimer, October 7, 1929, Stettheimer Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

17. Stettheimer's correspondence and edited diaries are located in the Stettheimer collections at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

18. Marsden Hartley, “The Paintings of Florine Stettheimer,” Creative Art 9 (July 1931): 19.

19. At Stanford University in the early 1970s, none of the many art history classes that I took mentioned women artists. In the early 1980s, at Yale, the only women artists mentioned in art history courses were Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Rosa Bonheur, and Mrs. Thomas Eakins, who was an artist but who was mainly referenced as one of her husband's sitters.

20. Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (1919; reprint, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 182.