Jansy Mello:  Thanks for sharing these, Barrie.  Are you planning to visit the show?

 It’s an interesting photo, Nabokov seems to have applied eye liner. Anyway, his expression is… well… picturesque, with a Fellini-movie touch and a hint of bristling hair running down his back…  I love it.

Barrie Karp: …picturesque the way a landscape is, a very American one perhaps [   ] For the VN photo, perhaps the view from below gives us an exaggerated idea of distance between left eye and brow.  It's a pre-Photoshop photo to perfection.  Dark, light, detail.  Light in the eyes.  Perhaps Bert Stern succeeded in getting VN to cede control, revealing more than he himself may have designed or usually permitted in print, in public, but probably also pleasing him. Does anyone know, did VN like this photo?

Jansy Mello:  Picturesque? Not in that sense related to quaint or sublime scenery. * Actually, instead of “in the manner of a painting” my intention had been to stress VN’s picture as being  “in the manner of a photograph”: the dramatic pose like a mask. I was reminded of another VN photograph, taken in the Alps, where he has wrapped himself in a shawl and imitates another writer (was it Borges?) or painter (Dali?)

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*I’m quoting wikipedia now because of a trivial coincidence: yesterday’s two postings mentioned a “sylvan Wye” (Wordsworth and “din”) and the river Wye, since Barrie very probably indicated: “Picturesque is an aesthetic ideal introduced into English cultural debate in 1782 by William Gilpin in Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, etc. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the Summer of the Year 1770, a practical book which instructed England’s leisured travelers to examine “the face of a country by the rules of picturesque beauty”. Picturesque, along with the aesthetic and cultural strands of Gothic and Celticism, was a part of the emerging Romantic sensibility of the 18th century.” (is there a distant and muffled rumble of PF’s New Wye and Wordsmith college?)