Woman who modelled for iconic Columbia Pictures logo had to compromise with random props

You've probably seen the Columbia Pictures logo dozens, if not hundreds, of times at the beginning on a whole range of movies.

However, not all is as it seems with the iconic image of the womanly personification of the United States standing tall with a torch of liberty held aloft.

It turns out she's actually a woman holding a desk lamp on her lunch break, but we'll get into more detail on that a little bit later.

It was 1991 and the movie studio Columbia Pictures decided they wanted to refresh their logo, so they approached artist Michael Deas and tasked him with creating a new version of their image of a woman holding up a torch.

However, Deas just could not find the right model to pose for his painting until he got chatting with a friend of his who worked for the New Orleans paper The Times-Picayune who told him they had just the right person.

That turned out to be a 28-year-old woman named Jenny Joseph, who was working for the paper at the time.

Michael J. Deas

As soon as he saw Jenny, Michael knew 'she's the one' and set up a photoshoot so he could take pictures that he'd use as a reference for the painting.

She agreed to help out on her lunch break, explaining that the artist 'wrapped a sheet round me' to get the image of Columbia's clothing right while she 'held a regular little desk lamp' as a makeshift prop to stand in for the torch.

At one point during the photoshoot, Jenny asked if she could sit down and told the artist she was actually pregnant at the time, so the iconic image you see in the opening titles of a movie is actually a pregnant lady wrapped in a sheet holding a lamp aloft.

Once the photos were done it took Michael two months to paint the whole thing and it's been seen by untold millions of people ever since then.

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Columbia should not be confused with the Statue of Liberty, who is a figure of the Roman goddess Libertas, though mixing them up is understandable because they're both women wrapped in sheets holding up torches with deep ties to the US.

As a personification her name was first invoked in 1776 in the Revolutionary War, and during the next century she became a national personification like Britannia of Great Britain and Marianne of France.

Over time her popularity diminished, swallowed up by the image of the Statue of Liberty, and she became known more and more for being the lady on the Columbia Pictures logo rather than anything else.