Still Life with Mouse, New York

In a career that spanned almost 70 years, Irving Penn produced groundbreaking work in the overlapping industries of fashion and fine–art photography. Still life played a central role for Penn, from his very first cover for Vogue in 1943 (an image of an arrangement of fashion accessories) to photographs made near the end of his life of vessels that he and his wife, Lisa Fonssagrives–Penn, had collected during their travels. An homage to the domestic interiors of 17th–century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, Still Life with Mouse is one such early example of Penn’s interest in the still–life genre. Vogue art director Alexander Liberman asked Penn to compose “the most symbolic picture of a farm kitchen” for a January 1948 “farm” issue of House and Garden. The published image was a cropped version of this photograph, in color, that included a model seated at left.