Painter of the Revolution
Date Published: January 13, 2026
Publisher: Acorn Publishing
The daughter of Parisian shopkeepers, Adélaïde dreams not of marriage or titles but of earning a place among the masters of French art. With Queen Marie Antoinette on the throne and a spirit of change in the air, anything seems possible. But as revolution brews and powerful forces conspire to deny her success, Adélaïde faces an impossible choice: protect her life—or fight for a legacy that will outlast her.
Inspired by the true story of one of the first women admitted to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, Adélaïde: Painter of the Revolution is a sweeping, evocative portrait of ambition, courage, and resilience in the face of history’s fiercest storm.
Interview with Janell Strube, author of Adélaïde: Painter of the Revolution
Could you tell us about any research trips you took for this story? Which places did you visit, and what made them essential to your writing?
I visited Paris several times and walked the streets and the places that would have existed in Adélaïde’s time. I visited Versailles, and also the New York Metropolitan Museum where her self-portrait was hanging. I visited as many artworks and/or artists in the Louvre Museum and other museums as possible. These visits were important to me so that Adélaïde could see and feel her surroundings, observe what spring air was like, what the trees looked like, how the flowers hung in baskets. I viewed as many paintings as I could in person so that I could provide the descriptions for them, and I used old maps and paintings of Paris at different times in history to get the right view and buildings for her time.
What's the strangest thing you've ever had to research online for your book?
The poisonous effects of the materials that artists used in their paints and the health impacts that these materials caused them.
What research (history, mythology, science) goes into your world-building?
I researched society, dress, speech (although I chose not to make their conversation 1775 English – especially when I was writing about France), what they ate, the music of the time, the philosophy and popular books and science discoveries of the time. I looked at maps and plotted all the artists and writers who lived in Adélaïde’s neighborhood so that I could have a greater understanding of who her neighbors were and who would have influenced her. I made an excel spreadsheet where I lined up the events in my characters’ lives with the events going on in society and the revolution and then plotted my book through the intersection of those events with their lives.
Have any of the people you've known, past or present, left a lasting impression on your writing journey? If so, we'd love to hear about a memorable experience that stands out to you.
I attended a week-long writing class in Dubai given by the author, Patrick Gale. One day, he had us do an exercise where we wrote about something in our own life that we had never been able to resolve. The next day, he had us to write that experience from the viewpoint of the other person. This became the crux of my memoir, growing up adopted in the sixties, and searching for belonging.
Do you write in the same genre all the time?
No, I am pretty much all over the place. I write poetry, memoir, essays and historical fiction. For now, I will stay with historical fiction and stay in the era of the French Revolution because I have more characters to explore from this time period.
If so, have you ever consider writing in another one?
I would like to write a fictionalized version of my adoptive mother’s family experience. As the story would take place in the depression and in WWII, it would still be considered historical, but it would have a totally different focus.
Which character, supernatural or human, do you enjoy writing the most and why?
In Adélaïde: Painter of the Revolution, I really enjoyed writing the character of Alexandré Vincent, the comic relief. Because I did not have so much historical information about him, other than a funny sketch of him drawn by his brother, François, I could really let my imagination play, coming up with his antics.
In my next project, I am enjoying writing the character of a damaged person who suffers from manic depression, which was not a diagnosis in his time, and how that impacted his family, the society he lived in and the lives of his friends.
About the Author
Janell Strube makes a mean barbecue sauce. She’s also a world traveler, a baker, and a bicyclist. But when she writes, her identity as an adoptee often steers her attention to topics of alienation, erased history, and displacement.
In 2024, a personal essay of hers was published in the anthology Adoption and Suicidality. Her work has also appeared in Shaking the Tree: brazen. short. memoir and A Year in Ink. Her short memoir, “Taking my Blonde Daughter to a Black Lives Matter Rally,” was selected for the 2020 San Diego Memoir Showcase, an annual live storytelling event.
While much of her writing is personal, she enjoys the freedom that comes with crafting fiction. Her desire to learn about forgotten female artists who shaped the French revolutionary period motivated her to write Adélaïde: Painter of the Revolution.
When not crunching numbers as a tax executive for a hotel chain, she can be found hanging out with Shiloh the Wheaten and plotting her second book.
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