Chapter Sixteen
Grace Visits Claude
Monday, October 4, 2010, Morganton, North Carolina
Claude Fouchet was the grandson of Ellen Stewart Brölemann, the painter’s sister and the reclining woman featured in The Baptism. Retired from Duke, where he’d been a professor of botany, he lived by himself in a farmhouse in the foothills of rural North Carolina, a two-hour drive from Winston-Salem. After Grace exchanged some introductory emails with him, she resolved to use a chunk of her expense budget to pay him a visit. Not only were his replies friendly in tone, but also he made it known that he had several boxes of old photographs.
Early in her inquiries, Grace had learned that Fouchet had been a helpful and opinionated source for what little scholarly research had been done on Stewart’s life
