Self-portrait Of A Lady

Joanna Hogg, whose films center on well-to-do Britons, now tells her own story.

- Rebecca Mead

The Wallace Collection, on Manchester Square, in central London, contains artworks that were gathered in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by successive Marquesses of Hertford. The museum, occupying a Georgian mansion, opened to the public in 1900, and is particularly known for its fine eighteenth-century French paintings—among them a small and delicate work by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, which is known in English as “The Souvenir.” It shows a young woman carving an initial into a tree trunk. She is wearing a gown of pink satin, its color enhancing the blush of her cheek. At her feet lies a letter that, presumably, was written by the lover whose initial she is inscribing.

She looks dreamy yet determined: the woman is caught in a reverie, but she is also making her mark.

Joanna Hogg first saw “The Souvenir” in 1980, when she was twenty years old. She was taken to see it by a man with whom she had a charged acquaintance, which soon developed into a consuming love affair. At the time, she was living in Knightsbridge and working in Soho, as a photographer’s assistant; she aspired to become a filmmaker but didn’t quite know how to go about it. She wasn’t sure what to make of the Fragonard, or why the man wanted to show it to her. Hogg had spent her teenage years at a boarding school deemed suitable for the less academically inclined daughters of the affluent and titled, and she had not gone to college. Her companion, who had studied art history at Cambridge University and at the Courtauld Institute, in London, struck her as immensely more knowledgeable. Nine years her senior, he was brimming with the confident, ironical charm bestowed by élite English schools. He wore double-breasted pin-striped suits and bow ties, and he had pronounced aesthetic preferences: Symbolist opera, the movies of Powell and Pressburger, a brand of Turkish cigarette with an elliptical shape.