Two commercial pictures that I never grow weary of looking at: from eighteenth century France, Fragonard's fashionably romantic "The Souvenir," featuring a lush depiction of a faithful spaniel watching its headstrong and quixotic mistress carving the initial 'S' into a tree trunk; and, snapped in London circa 1960, Bruce Davidson's famous black and white photograph of an affectedly elfin beatnik chick with her emblematic little kitten.
I often think that the subjects could be two separate incarnations of the same naif young girl, divided by a couple of hundred years and changing fashions in hairstyle. Fragonard's picture shows our girl ala ancien regime, just before her kind will vanish in a bloodbath of guillotines and pitchfork-inspired revolutions. Davidson, on the other hand, presents her in the vanguard of a new breed: flowery kaftans, phoney Eastern philosophy and earth shoes await this proto-bohemian - perhaps a fate worse than death? Although, as the great author Anthony Powell once confided, there is always something quite beguiling about a girl who looks like she's slept under a hedge.
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