I didn't write as clearly as I might've, though others apparently hit upon my meaning. I wasn't suggesting that the name of the model for the nymph might be discovered, but only that the model - in the sense of the commercial in its entirety, the image in toto - might have been a creation of the author's, albeit sparked by a real example. Btw, in the 60s there were numerous spoofs, most notably by the British pop artist Richard Hamilton, of toilet paper commercials on the telly in America...the absurdity of the Arcadian nymphs amid their flower'd dells standing in for the terribly quotidian purpose and use of the paper. Which N. was apparently prescient of in the 50s!
Yours in coeval memory,
On Oct 31, 2006, at 4:10 PM, Andrew Brown wrote:
I don’t think D. Barton Johnson, a major figure in Nabokov studies and a founder of the N-list, was asking for the name of a real life model for the nymph. He was asking for an identification of the toiletry inside “an altar in a wood.”
I was born in 1954 and, using my earliest memories, I picture the “altar” to be a decorative sink countertop surmounted by a shell-shaped mirror, larger and more elaborate than a mere medicine cabinet mirror. In the cabinetry adjacent to the mirror one would find commercial beauty and health care products from Chanel and Revlon, as well as facial creams by Pacquins (my mother’s favorite, and a scent that, to me, has a Proustian mnemonic power) to “medicine’s” such as Miltown or Seconal, for one’s beauty sleep, and Benzedrine for keeping that youthful figure nice and slim.