Irving Penn

platinum-palladium print, flush-mounted to aluminum, signed, dated, and editioned '7/15' in pencil with typed information and copyright/reproduction rights label on the reverse, framed, 1949, printed in 1970

Acquired from Marlborough Gallery, New York, in the late 1970s

This print in generally excellent condition.
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This image is one of a series of photographs Penn took of Jean Patchett for the June 1950 issue of American Vogue.  A variant image appeared in the extensive feature article, 'Vogue's Eye View of 90 Summer Days.' 

Jean Patchett (1926 – 2002) was 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.