Penelope Tree, nineteen, daughter of Mr Ronald and the Hon. Marietta Tree – the look of a dreamy Petrouchka. “I am all make-up,” she once said: she sees her face as a canvas, brushing on colour to strange, beguiling, sometimes extraordinary effect. While the effect on other people can be startling, she remains totally serene. Her imaginative face-painting began when she was thirteen. “I did it first to get attention, now I don’t notice it.” With a bright acquisitive mind that absorb countries, people, books, her heroes are Mailer and Nabokov, aesthetics and politics her life, and she takes a beautiful picture. This one, with bird feather eyes, by Avedon.
Photographed by Richard Avedon.
Scanned from Beauty in Vogue, 1969.
