Painting Catherine

A Portrait of New Orleans in the 1920s

By: C. A. Whitney

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Paperback | 4 June 2026

At a Glance

Paperback
272 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.86 x 15.24 x 1.45

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Set against the vibrant artistic movement of 1920s New Orleans, Painting Catherine immerses readers in a world of creativity and romance. Seen through the eyes of Daniel Webster Whitney, a gifted but troubled painter, the novel explores the magnetic pull of the French Quarter's artistic community and the interior lives of those who inhabit it such as William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, Conrad Albrizio, Lyle Saxon and others.

As Dan moves through sizzling nightly salons alive with conversation and passion, New Orleans becomes more than a beautiful back drop - it's a living force that seeps into his work, pushing him toward bolder expression and deeper self-discovery. In the midst of this spiritual ascendence Dan falls in love with his effervescent debutante pupil, Catherine. Life and romance and its ebbs and flows from soaring emotional highs to despair are part of Dan's experience and expressed in his art.

Rich in atmosphere and emotional depth, this novel captures the beauty and turbulence of a creative life. Dan is a seeker who strives for a transcendence to a higher level of consciousness, a quest for even just a sliver of another dimension.

Industry Reviews

Book Review 1: John Shelton Reed, author of Dixie Bohemia

Painting Catherine offers a thinly fictionalized depiction of Dan Whitney, a remarkable twentieth-century artist and a remarkable man. But, even more, it portrays the Southern version of Greenwich Village found in the French Quarter in the 1920s, and at the characters and institutions that created it. Anyone interested in la vie boh¨me, New Orleans-style, should read this book.

Book review 2: Kevin Baker, author of Dreamland

Catherine Whitney's Painting Catherine is an evocative novel about the very real painters, writers, and general characters who made up New Orleans' dazzling cultural life in the 1920s and '30s. Based closely on true events, it is a story of heartbreak, of courage, of redemption, and of the desire for life and the life of desire-much like everything else about the Crescent City.

Book 3: Jack Hitt, author of Bunch of Amateurs: A Search for the American Character.

A captivating portrait of the artist as a young man--after he survives a World War, falls in with William Faulkner's generation, finds love in the French Quarter, discovers his own aesthetic in painting, and succumbs to the lure of America's only European city, New Orleans.

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