Irving Penn b. 1917

The photographer to Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Acquired by the present collection from the above, 2002

Other prints of this image:

Irving Penn, Moments Preserved (New York, 1960), p. 125

Irving Penn, Passage (New York, 1991), p. 78

Polly Devlin, Vogue Book of Fashion Photography, 1919-1979 (New York, 1979), p. 111

This image was originally published in the June 1950 issue of American Vogue, as the introductory full-page illustration for an extensive feature article, ‘Vogue’s Eye View of 90 Summer Days.’  The lengthy caption for the photograph begins, ‘Caught, like a fish, by the sharp metallic hook of a telephone bell, the lady is pulled up from the depths of summer sleep.  On the line which dredges her up to the bright surface of a June morning might be. . . . .’  The text then goes on to imagine a variety of telephone conversations that might throw any lady of the house into a tizzy---from the arrival of out-of-town guests, to her husband’s urgent request to bring unexpected clients home for dinner.  With the June Vogue’s 90-day plans for menus, wardrobe, beauty, and more, the article suggests, the Vogue woman will be prepared for all.

The woman in the photograph is Jean Patchett (1926 – 2002), one of the most photographed models of the late 1940s and 1950s.   A native of Preston, a small town on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, she joined the Ford Model Agency in 1947.  She worked with many of the innovative fashion photographers of the day, including not only Penn, but also Cecil Beaton, Erwin Blumenfeld, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Horst, and John Rawlings.  She was featured on more than 40 magazine covers for Vogue, Glamour, and Harper’s Bazaar.  A mole just above her right eye was her trademark.

Her sessions with Irving Penn resulted in some of his most remembered fashion photographs, especially the Black-and-White Vogue Cover, also from 1950. Patchett’s tremendous appeal is perhaps most evident in another of Penn’s famous photographs of her, wearing a dotted silk suit and biting on a strand of pearls, taken in a café in Lima, Peru.