KENNINGTON, Jill model, socialite and photographer. Manuscript.Oblong sketchbook Approx 30 cm x 24 cm, stapled card wrappers, dated 1970 and titled “Greece, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India”. Pp 16 with thirty five drawings mounted on rectos. With drawings and watercolours of Indian street scenes and architecture. Also, an original Jill Kennington photograph “ Wind Tree” signed and dated 2001. Kennington travelled extensively during her modelling years , and recorded her travels in her sketchbooks. She shows street scenes, hippy tourists, policemen and local people.
In an interview with Brendan Buesnel in 2012 Kennington describes her move to London and starting work at Harrods. Within three months she had met a top modelling agent at a party at the Savoy . Within a week she was touring the British Isles with Norman Hartnell, Queen Elizabeth’s dress designer. She changed agents and began modelling for the Daily Express fashion pages , as a “girl from the country” visiting Ascot, Henley and Glyndebourne. This led to work with Mary Quant, and her hair was cut by Vidal Sassoon. Jill travelled to New York and Paris and photo shoots took her to the Sahara and the Arctic. She enjoyed the music scene, and met Mick Jagger whilst doing a David Bailey shoot, and the Beatles attended the same cocktail parties that she went to. In the mid 1960’s Kennington had a small part in Michelangelo Antonioni’s movie” Blow Up”, now a famous classic. Jill was in Paris in 1968, living in the Latin quarter, and then , after witnessing the student riots and dodging tear gas, moved to Italy for nine years, often working for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. In Rome she became good friends with the film director David Lean and his wife, travelling with them to Polynesia and Africa. She worked occasionally with Helmut Newton in the South of France in the late 1970’s, and by 1982 she had decided to take a career break, and she went to her mother’s crofter’s cottage in the Outer Hebrides, taking a camera with her. The pictures that she took really enthused her, and she found that they sold well, giving her the confidence to continue taking pictures. She married Richard Courtauld, and through a friend , gained an introduction to Andy Warhol’s factory, and took his portrait. She went on to take David Lean’s portrait and found that “the commissions started to roll in”. At the time of her interview she had 21 portraits hanging in the National Portrait Gallery in London. She has worked with many famous photographers, including John Cowan, Norman Parkinson, David Bailey, Terence Donovan, Lord Litchfield, Brian Duffy, Helmut Newton, Jeanloup Sieff, Richard Avedon, William Klein and Bob Richardson. This collection came via the book trade from the estate of a family member.
