That Davenport
Thursday, July 07, 2016
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| Irma - Buenos Aires - 2013 |
sofá
Del fr.
sofa, este del persa ṣoffe, y este del ár. clás. ṣuffah.
1. m.
Asiento cómodo para dos o más personas, que tiene respaldo y brazos.
Artist through the ages have been fascinated by the
unclothed female (I am sure that there are also of males, too but my interest
in that direction is limited) languidly reclining on a sofa.
Out of curiousity I looked up the word sofa in Spanish
(sofá) in my on line RAE (Real Academia Española) dictionary. I found it
pleasant to see that the word came from expert recliners of antiquity, the
Persians. Perhaps the Greeks, during the wars with the Persians adopted the
reclining sofa which was then copied by the Romans.
While in Mexico in the 70s, I knew a very upper-crust
sounding American woman who was married to a Welshman. She was named Vivien
Worsdall. She was in her 60s and she always said, “Let’s have luncheon,” and
she never called a sofa that but a davenport.
Many years ago I especially remembered Vivien when I went
to a American Hosta Society convention in Iowa and our buses went past a
flooded Davenport. As to why Davenport, Iowa is called that my Wikipedia has
the following citation:
Davenport is the county seat of Scott County in Iowa and
is the largest of the Quad Cities, a metropolitan area with a population
estimate of 382,630 and a CSA population of 474,226, making it the 90th largest
CSA in the nation. Davenport was founded on May 14, 1836 by Antoine LeClaire
and was named for his friend, George Davenport, a colonel during the Black Hawk
War stationed at nearby Fort Armstrong.
As to why some uppity Americans call a sofa a Davenport
my Wikipedia further illuminated me with this:
Davenport was the
name of a series of sofas made by the Massachusetts furniture manufacturer A.
H. Davenport and Company, now defunct. Due to the popularity of the furniture
at the time, the name davenport became a genericized trademark.
While I may be no artist I have taken many photographs of
undraped women on a sofa. I am enclosing one of Argentine Irma. I photographed
her in 2013 in Nora Patrich’s home in Bellavista, Buenos Aires.
The psychiatric couch finds a home
The psychiatric couch finds a home
