Carnegie Museum of Art

This is the Carnegie Museum of Art, part of the Carnegie Museum, one of Andrew Carnegie's wonderful gifts to the city of Pittsburgh. Cam works here as the curator of modern art. It is here, in her office, that she first falls through the time tube while trying to do research to inject some much-needed intrigue into her biography of the painter, Anthony Van Dyck. I think she gets all the intrigue she can handle.

Carnegie stairs

Here are the steps just inside the entrance that take a visitor up to the galleries. These are the steps Cam is running down near the start of the book. The steps are at least twice as deep as regular steps, which means you take two steps on each stair, which makes running down or up them very awkward.

One of Lely's portraits

What qualities must a painter possess to get his subject to pose like this? That's the question I asked myself, and the one I had Cam ask herself.

Painted Ladies

The cover of the exhibit catalog showing the Peter Lely portrait with which Cam and Jeanne are entranced. I can see why. Like Cam doing her Lely research, I dropped a bundle on this book. I had to buy it at abe.com since it's out of print.

Lely self-portrait

This is a self-portrait of Peter Lely. He didn't paint very many self-portraits. In the book, Cam first grows interested in Peter when she sees this self-portrait. I'm not a big fan of mustaches, so I used my authorial power and ignored that part, but I love the rest of it. He really does look like a man who's lived through some unhappiness. I hope Peter enjoys the journey I've taken him on. I'd like to think it's one he would have picked for himself.

Cyclops Building, Mt. Lebanon

This is the building Cam lives in in Mt. Lebanon. It used to be called the Cyclops Building and many of the floors served as the headquarters to Cyclops Steel Corp. Now it is the more anonymous "650 Washington Road," a significant decline if you ask me. It's the tallest building in Mt. Lebanon counting floors--I'm sure many church spires are taller--and it always struck me as odd that someone would build such a relatively tall building in a suburb. It has a magnificent view of the South Hills, which is why I put Cam in a loft at the top, though it really isn't a residential building at all. I would love to see a restaurant or bar at the top so that everyone could enjoy the view. When I was a kid my orthodontist was on the second floor of this building.

I took the picture from the top of the Mt. Lebanon parking garage. In the book, Cam and Jacket are standing on the top of garage when Jacket asks her to marry him.

Aldo Coffee, Mt. Lebanon

This is Aldo Coffee in Mt. Lebanon. It is directly across the street from the Cyclops Building. Once he's smitten with Cam, poor Peter plants himself here every day to watch her come home from work. And while he loves the coffee, I think he ultimately sets himself up for more pain than happiness there, for he ends up seeing Jacket greet Cam, hug her and lead her upstairs. Rough for a hero who's falling in love again for the first time in over 300 years...

The View from Aldo's Window

This is Peter's view, looking out the window. You can see the Cyclops Building across the street.

Peter's Building, Mt. Lebanon

This is another building on Washington Road in Mt. Lebanon. Tt's the building where Peter takes lodging when he decides he'll stay in Cam's time until he changes her mind about writing his fictography. It's a building with a very interesting history, but what I love about it is the fact it looks like a castle. I figured if Peter were going to live anywhere, it would have to be in a building that almost looks as if could have been build in 1673. The building was designed in 1928 or so to be a theatre. That's why it has a marquee in the front. But before it was finished, the stock market crashed and the man who was building it lost all his money. It was never finished as a theatre. Instead it became an insurance company for William Hall Insurance. There are apartments on the second floor, though. For many years, until this year, actually, the first floor housed a very upscale wedding dress shop called Anne Gregory for the Bride. This building and the bridal shop was used as a location in a really romantic movie called, The Bread, My Sweet (though the title was changed to A Wedding for Bella when it went to DVD), another good reason for Peter to make it his home.

Peter's Door

Here's a picture of the door to the apartments upstairs. It's to the left of a shop that used to sell bridal gowns as you're facing the building. Those are the original light fixtures. They're gorgeous, and I love the rosettes above the door:

Ursula

This is one of the paintings from which Cam extrapolates her version of Peter's life with Ursula.

Duchess of Portsmouth

This is the Duchess of Portsmouth by Peter Lely. Nell refers to the Duchess as having a cockeye. I think she may be exaggerating a bit.

Alex Katz's Ada

There's a lot of art in Flirting with Forever--Peter's, Van Dyck's and a trio of other painters that help set up parallels to Peter's own relationship. This is a painting done by Alex Katz of his beloved Ada. While Katz has painted other subjects, he has come back time after time to his favorite subject, Ada, his wife of many decades. I love that you can see how much he loves her, even with wrinkles and gray hair. He always paints her through a lens of deep affection.

Andrew Wyeth's Helga

This is another painting that has significance in the book. In 1986, Andrew Wyeth revealed his Helga collection--247 works of a woman named Helga who was his neighbor and helper. He painted and drew her over and over, naked and dressed, without the knowledge (Wyeth says) of Wyeth's wife or Helga's husband, over a period of 14 years. It was the first time such a massive collection, done around a single subject, had been revealed as a whole, and it rather shocked the art world. He sold the collection to a single buyer for a massive amount of money, but I find his whole fascination with this woman very interesting.

Pierre Bonnard's Marte

This is a painting by French painter, Pierre Bonnard. He had a very turbulent relationship with his wife/muse, Marte. Like Wyeth and Katz, he painted his favorite subject over and over, but Bonnard was a little different. He always painted Marte at the same age, when they first fell in love. Even as she got older, he painted her as a young woman, often in her bath, and it continued that way even after she died. He always saw her the same way.

Nell on chaise

The painting that caused such a commotion. The London Times reports that, even now, three hundred years later, experts can't agree on who the woman in the painting is.