Remembered as one of the twentieth century's most outstanding photographers, Irving Penn solidified his legacy by bridging the gap between commercial and fine art photography. Penn began his career as a trained painter and graphic designer, and in 1943 was invited by famed art director Alexander Liberman to work as his assistant at Vogue magazine, where he was put to work on the front cover. Throughout his nearly seventy-year career, Penn shot 165 covers for the magazine, more than any other to date. He created a visual language that starkly contrasted the previous modes of shooting fashion, those that favored elaborately designed sets, dramatic lighting, and props to set up a story. The resistance he faced from the current fashion photographers to adapt to his new vision led Liberman to advise Penn to shoot the images himself, thus starting his photographic career (Exhibition Catalogue, Irving Penn Centennial, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2017, p. 95).

While a student at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art in the 1930s, where he pursued his passion for painting, Penn was acquainted with the man who would become his first mentor, Alexey Brodovitch. Recognizing Penn’s astute eye and undeniable talent, Brodovitch, an editor at Harper’s Bazaar at the time, took Penn under his wing, and soon thereafter, to the magazine’s offices. Penn would later consider Brodovitch his ‘spiritual, aesthetic father’ for having encouraged Penn to ‘give up the preciousness’ in his work and learn to appreciate beauty within the details of form, texture, materiality, color, and seemingly mundane details (ibid, p. 11). This concept guided Penn’s approach to his subjects and became the hallmark of his work, one that he continued to employ during his professional career at Vogue.

Girl in Veiled Hat (Jean Patchett), New York, August 18, 1949 was creating during one of Penn’s shoots for Vogue, which in October accompanied an article titled “Vogue’s Eye View of Diablerie”. It is a fine example of his pared down compositions, focusing the eye on form and texture, without any superfluous detail. Patchett’s pose and veiled countenance, meanwhile, suggests a bit of mystery that was on theme with the assignment.