LATE 18TH EARLY 19TH CENTURY

Jane Kendall Mason had a much-discussed relationship with Ernest Hemingway, who used many details of her life in his fiction -- including a description of her Spanish statues with human hair in the original draft of To Have and Have Not (expurgated for legal reasons, as the descriptions of Mrs. Bradley were so explicitly modelled on Jane; the original manuscript resides in the Ernest Hemingway Collection of the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston).

Under the influence of her close friend Clare Booth Luce, the wife of the founder of Time Magazine Henry Luce, Jane flirted with a conversion to Catholicism, collecting devotional objects such as this one.