It was quite difficult to pick just one Beaton photograph as portrait of the week but in the end I went with this wonderfully frothy and romantic picture of Queen Elizabeth, dolled up in all her finery in Buckingham Palace in 1939. Today marks the birthday of Sir Cecil Beaton, whose wonderfully glamorous photographs always evoke for me the heady, brittle glamour of mid twentieth century high society – from film stars to writers to shy debutantes to their sophisticated mothers, he captured them all for posterity. Photo: Royal Collection © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. His work has been presented in major exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery, London the Museum of the City of New York, USA and the Imperial War Museum, London.Queen Elizabeth, Buckingham Palace, Sir Cecil Beaton, 1939. Beaton’s contributions as a stage designer to the films, Gigi (1958) and My Fair Lady (1964) gained him Oscars and made him a household name.Ĭecil Beaton was born in London in 1904. Finally, Beaton was appointed as an official photographer for the Ministry of Information in 1940. After photographing Queen Elizabeth in Buckingham Palace in 1939, Beaton was invited to become the Royal photographer of choice.
Beaton’s aesthetic remained highly artful if not so brazenly artificial. Throughout the 1930s, he shot Hollywood film stars for Vanity Fair, revealing an increasing reliance on close-ups of the face, often strongly modelled by contrasting light and shade, and also the increasing incorporation of floral motifs. The sisters proved useful props for the young photographer, as he experimented with backdrops, materials and photographic techniques.Īs a fashion photographer, Beaton worked for Vogue in London, Paris, and New York. Throughout the decade, though, Beaton’s most frequent sitters were his two sisters, Nancy and Barbara, known as ‘Baba’.
A prominent member of the ‘Bright Young Things’, Beaton photographed a generation of glitzy young aristocrats and socialites including Edith Sitwell and Stephen Tennant. Beaton is known for his elaborately decorated and intricate backdrops, which often nod towards Surrealism. Cecil Beaton was an influential photographer, illustrator, costume and set designer.
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