The Oak Lovers
A novel based on the life of Carl Ahrens
(Currently being written)
Want to know more? Click here to read excerpts from The Oak Lovers.
In the summer of 1900, Martha Niles, a promising seventeen year old artist, apprentices in the book shop at the Roycroft community in East Aurora, New York. Among the Roycrofters is Carl Ahrens, a married, middle-aged Canadian landscape painter. When the two meet, an unlikely and controversial relationship ensues.
Martha discovers Carl is far more than an artistic genius who studied under William Merritt Chase and George Inness; he is also a traveling companion of Calamity Jane, an innovative oral surgeon, a friend of recitalist Pauline Johnson, a titled nobleman, and the adopted son of an Ojibwa chief. Martha is enthralled both by Carl’s striking appearance and his talent: the trees in his paintings appear to dance, grieve, and embrace. That he is twice her age, consumptive, and crippled does not lessen her regard, and few things delight her more than their heated debates.
Carl recognizes at once that he has found a companion, lover, and soul-mate combined. He declares her his muse, renames her Madonna, and patiently waits for her to confess she loves him as fiercely as he loves her. Instead, as their relationship teeters on the edge of scandal, Madonna announces that she must leave. He has no choice but to let her.
His dilemmas: a wife who despises him, but refuses to set him free, destitution, and a chronic and excruciating disease that forces him to reside in death’s shadow.
Like the oak lovers in his paintings, Carl and Madonna are fused at the root; separation is a gaping wound that will never heal and nearly proves fatal for Carl. Reuniting requires changing the entire course of their lives and, once together, the sacrifices have only just begun.
Written by Carl and Madonna Ahrens’ great-granddaughter, The Oak Lovers takes readers from the art colonies of New York, to the Spanish missions in California, to Edwardian Toronto and the Ontario countryside. It is based on the true story of a critically acclaimed yet neglected painter and the woman who inspired him, loved him, nursed him, infuriated him, and at times quite literally held him up.