Who is Romaine Brooks as noted in the book, After Sappho?

Schwartz opens Chapter Six with a brief description of the passionate romantic relationship between Natalie Barney and the American painter Romaine Brooks. In 1904, Romaine looks “for a place where she could live in peaceable sin and paint” (118). She soon moves to Paris, where she meets Natalie. In Paris, Romaine paints portraits of her many friends and lovers. She and Natalie build a villa together in the South of France; they refer to the house as the Trait d’union (The Hyphen). The villa gives each woman a separate wing in which they might focus on their respective art, yet a central dining room allows them to “remain linked at a single, voluntary point” (115). The narrator notes that, in their own way, Natalie and Romaine were “together for nearly fifty years” (115). During the First World War, Romaine—along with Eileen Gray and Ida Rubenstein—works as an ambulance driver at the frontline. Late in the novel, Romaine’s friends discover a stunning self-portrait of her, noting that “at last [Romaine] had taken the risk of her own body” (180).