From the Sitwells to the Rolling Stones…

Introduction

Cecil Beaton (1904 to 1980) was a phenomenon. He made himself into the leading fashion photographer of his day, but that was far from being his only achievement: he was also a fashion illustrator, a painter, a writer of fashion essays and books (34 books in total), a social caricaturist, a serious wartime photographer, a costume and set designer for theatre and the movies, while all the time keeping one of the classic celebrity diaries of the century (at his death he left no fewer than 143 diaries which were published in 6 handsome volumes).

But the core of his achievement was the forty years he spent as a leading figure in fashion photography and that’s what this grand exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery focuses on. Aptly titled ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’, it is the first exhibition to exclusively explore Beaton’s pioneering contributions to fashion photography.

It’s designed to be a landmark show, with some 250 items on display, mostly wonderful photos but also including Beaton’s:

• drawings
• illustrations
• magazine covers
• a youthful home movie he and friends made of fooling around
• several painted portraits of him by artist friends
• and, in display cases:
  • a handsome collection of first editions of 20 or so of his books
  • the actual Kodak camera he did his early work on
  • the Oscar he won for ‘My Fair Lady’

1920s and ’30s

After the Second World War Beaton spent more time doing set and stage design, and in America working in Hollywood. It’s from this period that date the many classic portraits of notable actors and artists and, in particular, of Hollywood stars from the 1950s and ’60s, which many of us are familiar with. These are regularly shown in exhibitions with titles like ‘Cecil Beaton: Portraits’ but that’s not what this one is about. This one really does focus on his fashion photography and related work (illustrations, covers, books) and so has lots of his photos for Vogue magazine from 1927 to 1937, depicting upper-middle class debutantes and society ladies in wonderfully elaborate outfits against ornately staged backdrops, none of whom we’ve heard of and will ever hear of again.

Princess Emeline De Broglie by Cecil Beaton (1928) Gelatin silver print, The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, London

Thus the very first room hosts 16 very big silver gelatin prints which survive from the landmark exhibition of Beaton portraits which the National Portrait Gallery held back in 1968. The curators point out that it was the first such show accorded a living photographer and helped to cement his reputation as ‘the finest arbiter of taste of the twentieth century’. And these 16 big black-and-white portraits are, indeed, stunning in composition and execution. But what I’m saying is they’re all of people you and I have never heard of: society figures from the 1920s and ’30s who are long forgotten. For example:

• Sita Devi, Princess Karam of Kapurthala, 1935
• The Honourable Mrs Richard Norton (Jean Norton), late 1920s
• Paula Gellibrand, the Marquesa de Casa Maury, 1928
• Mrs Harrison Williams (Mona Williams), 1936
• Hazel, Lady Lavery, late 1920s
• Mrs Robert H. McAdoo (Lorraine McAdoo), 1934
• Lady Sylvia Ashley, 1934
• Mrs Allan Ryan, Junior (Janet Ryan), 1929
• Doris, Viscountess Castlerosse, 1932

A few leading actors are included (the beautiful young Vivienne Leigh) but the Hollywood celebs, for the most part, come a lot later.

Installation view of ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ at the National Portrait Gallery showing three portraits from the first room recreating of the 1968 show: note the elaborate paper-cut roses on the wall, echoing Beaton’s classic floral backgrounds (photo by the author)

Beaton’s beginnings

After this introductory room of greatest hits from the 1920s, The show is laid out in a straightforward chronological order. It starts with Cecil being born the son of a prosperous timber merchant in Hampstead. He had two sisters (Nancy and Barbara aka ‘Baba’) who appear in his earliest photos, as well as photos of his mother, Etty. After prep and public school, he got a place at Cambridge, where he studied history, art and architecture but wasn’t very academically minded and put most of his energy into theatre and the Footlights Revue.

The early rooms contain photos of his two glamorous sisters, Cambridge friends and society contacts. These include a wonderful picture of the artist Rex Whistler posing as a character from a Watteau painting. We learn that this was one of a series of tableaux en fête champêtre (‘pictures from a country festival’), a homage to the stylised paintings of Lancret, Watteau and Fragonard held at Wilsford Manor, Stephen Tennant’s family home, which Cecil organised in the summer of 1927. Next to it is a large portrait of Stephen Tennant, brightest of the Bright Young Things.

Installation view of ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ at the National Portrait Gallery showing the big portrait of a young Stephen Tennant

It’s in this room that the home movie is showing. It was made at Weirbridge Cottage near Savay Farm, Denham, in Buckinghamshire, the country home of the Mosley family and featured Bright Young Things such as Teresa ‘Baby’ Jungman, Georgia Sitwell, John Strachey, and the ubiquitous Tennant.

The point is Beaton’s ambition and determination. His parents were affluent enough to send him to private school and Cambridge but the rest was up to him and so he became a networker of genius. He managed to be taken up by all the important cultural circles of the day, namely: 1) Lady Ottoline Morell, the famous hostess of artists and writers at her country house, Garsington Manor, 2) the Sitwells, led by the poetess Edith Sitwell.

Charming, clever, charismatic, ambitious, talented, Beaton made friends and contacts wherever he went and people were flattered to be photographed by him. So in this room are photos of Lady Ottoline and some of her circle, of Edith and her brothers Sacheverell and Osbert. He is quoted as saying he learned an immense amount about posh upper-class manners and taste from his stays at Sacheverell’s country house at Weston Hall, Northamptonshire. Study, copy, rise.

Originally taken for the larks, Beaton’s photographs of Tennant and his circle now have considerable historical value, being considered some of the best representations of the Bright Young People of the twenties and thirties.

What comes over from all these wonderful black-and-white shots is the extent to which modernist art had been assimilated into the culture, especially in the 1920s. The tranquil rural settings of the Watteau homages are the exceptions because most of the photos are highly stylised interiors, taken against often striking Art Deco backgrounds, which make the photos works of art in themselves, as in the striking polka dot backdrop for Princess Emeline De Broglie, above. Here’s an installation view showing half a dozen of his wonderfully stylised 1920s and ’30s portraits. Note the striking modernist backdrops, the lovely outfits and the dramatic poses.

Installation view of Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World at the National Portrait Gallery

One modernist technique he used to dramatic effect was deploying multiple exposures. There are one or two examples here, although not the famous masterpiece, his portrait of Nancy Cunard.

Cecil’s self-creation

Part of Beaton’s ambition to get into the best social and artistic circles of the day was the drive to invent himself, to curate, mould and promote his own image. One result was that, over the years, a huge number of photos were taken of Beaton himself, a large number of artful self portraits but also portraits by other snappers, especially in his post-war celebrity period. The curators boast that the National Portrait Gallery alone holds 360 portraits of Beaton, by some of the most celebrated practitioners ranging from Man Ray to Richard Avedon, Dorothy Wilding to David Bailey, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Irving Penn and Arnold Newman. And so the exhibition includes photos of:

• Cecil play-acting as King Cnut
• Cecil outside the Excelsior Hotel, Venice
• Cecil in Room 1806 at the Ambassador Hotel, New York
• Cecil dressed up as the popular novelist Elinor Glyn
• Cecil on the Menai Suspension Bridge
• Cecil in RAF photographer’s uniform, the Western Desert
• Cecil and Truman Capote in Tangier
• Cecil and Audrey Hepburn on the set of My Fair Lady
• Cecil looking grand in a cloak by the great American photographer Irving Penn in 1950

And many more.

Cecil’s stagings

I thought the single most important piece of information in the exhibition was the curators’ own observation that Beaton was never known as a highly skilled technical photographer. Instead, he focused on staging a compelling model or scene.

At school, university and after there’s plenty of evidence that he loved the theatre, loved staging plays and performances (the home movie, the Watteau series), loved not just acting in them but costume and set designing. Indeed, it was not just photography alone but his ability to make designs for the charity galas staged by fashionable London society, which boosted his reputation among the rich and titled. Here’s an installation view showing three of his photo portraits from a 1930s charity ball, which demonstrate just how elaborate these settings could be, almost dwarfing the human subjects. Note the mad profusion of flowers.

Installation view of ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ at the National Portrait Gallery (photo by the author)

Once this talent for dressing a set is explained you see it everywhere. We are told that Beaton owned a couple of trunks full of props and spent a lot of time dressing and arranging the set or backdrop before he got around to the person or model to be shot. In so many of the shots it’s the dress and costume the sitter is wearing (this is fashion, after all) that has a lot to do with it – but what made it so Beaton would be the elaborateness or artfulness of the backdrops.

And so this is what a lot of the photos here consist of: classic debutante and society shots from the ’20s and ’30s – tall, elegant ladies in stunningly beautiful dresses, against stylishly imaginative backdrops. Here’s a photo which demonstrates both his flair for self-presentation and an example of his elaborate and stylish backdrops, in a self-portrait from the 1930s. See what I mean by ornate and elaborate backdrops. And flowers. Lots of cut flowers.

Cecil Beaton (c.1935) The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, London

The sources of Cecil’s style

Almost entirely self-taught, Beaton established a highly distinctive photographic style which combined 1) Edwardian stage portraiture, 2) hints of contemporary European surrealism, 3) the more modernist approach of the great American photographers of the era, all filtered through 4) a pointedly English sensibility. The more I looked the more this ‘English sensibility’ could be summarised as lots of flowers.

Once you’ve recognised these elements, you can see how the mix varied in different shots or periods. For example, the portraits of his arty friends (the BYTs, the Sitwells) use a European modernist sensibility, all Art Deco lines and geometric backdrops, whereas the debutante balls are all English roses (lots and lots of roses). When, in the 1950s, he did Hollywood film stars, there are a few staged settings but most are shot in a more American, democratic, unstaged way. The famous portraits of Elizabeth Taylor or Marilyn Monroe are all about capturing (supposedly) unstaged and natural moments.

Elizabeth Taylor by Cecil Beaton (1955) The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, London

Reflecting on this, you realise that being invited to do the costume and set design for the Broadway musical, and then for the movie version, of ‘My Fair Lady’ was a dream come true for Beaton, because it is a costume drama, a period piece, set in his beloved Edwardian era, but heightened and stylised through a 20th century sensibility. The outfit and backdrop in the photo below, for instance. They have the feel and apparent shape of an Edwardian outfit, but the details of the dress design, and especially the receding square of the backdrop, owe more to the 1960s Op Art of Bridget Riley than the 1900s world of Edward Elgar.

Audrey Hepburn in costume for ‘My Fair Lady’ by Cecil Beaton (1963) The Cecil Beaton Archive, London

Beaton and British Vogue

Cecil managed to sell his first photo to British Vogue while still an undergraduate and signed a contract with them in 1927. For the next decade he worked as a staff photographer for Vogue and the core of the exhibition is lots of work from this period. This includes not just fashion shoots but illustrations and covers.

Regarding the illustrations, about half a dozen are on show here, all of them are good, and some of them are sublime. Obviously it’s fashion with its eternal body fascism, so all the women are immensely tall with unfeasibly long necks but, if you enter that world, those are the rules.

Installation view of ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ at the National Portrait Gallery showing one of Beaton’s many fashion drawings: note the extreme thinness and elongation of the models;  in fashion, everything changes and yet nothing changes

Vogue covers

More light is shed on Beaton’s strengths and weaknesses in the matter of magazine covers. You’d have expected the young genius to have supplemented his elaborate fashion shoots with umpteen cover shoots for Vogue but, surprisingly, no. Very few of his classic shots made it onto the cover of Vogue. This was, apparently, because he was too opinionated to submit to the requirements of art directors who needed to arrange images to have lots of text imposed over them. Cecil wouldn’t play ball. So surprisingly few covers.

Installation view of ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ showing the display case of holding some of his (relatively few) magazine covers (photo by the author)

Cecil’s antisemitism

Then disaster struck. In 1937, for reasons he could not immediately explain, as he put the finishing touches to a finely-detailed decorative border to a double-page illustration for Vogue, Beaton added in tiny writing an antisemitic slur – basically, he used the k word. Though almost microscopic, it did not go unnoticed. 130,000 copies of the early February 1938 edition were pulped as the magazine’s editors fielded a backlash from  advertisers who threatened a boycott. Condé Nast forced Beaton’s resignation from Vogue. Beaton’s humiliation was sudden and total. Then again, this is the world of fashion. Two years later, partially rehabilitated by the seriousness of his war photography (see below), Vogue rehired him.

The Royals

In 1939, much to his own surprise, Beaton was invited to Buckingham Palace to photograph Queen Elizabeth, wife of the reigning monarch, George VI. Only two years earlier he had potentially alienated the Royals by doing portraits of the two figures at the heart of the scandal which rocked the family, the 1936 Abdication Crisis, namely Edward Prince of Wales and the American divorcee he fell in love with, Wallis Simpson. His 1937 portraits of them are here and very impressive, too, especially Wallis in a striking black and white Schiaparelli jacket.

But despite having taken stylish photos of the Royals’ enemy, he was now invited into the heart of the establishment, to take photos of the loyal Royals, and this was to open up a whole new aspect of his career. Queen Elizabeth (who was to become the Queen Mother) was charming, her husband mild and unassuming, and he took various sets of them. But over the  next decade or more it was their daughter, the young Princess Elizabeth, who stole the show, who emerged from girlhood into young maturity and be captured in a series of photoshoots. Beaton was the official photographer for her coronation (2 June 1953), and captured the growth of her young family. There’s a great shot of her with the toddler Prince Charles.

Meanwhile, her sister, the more fashionable and flirtatious Princess Margaret, was also given the Beaton treatment, but in a more stylish and elegant manner than her more homely sister. Beaton’s long association with the Royals, during which he helped to mould their public image, has been the subject of more than one exhibition and numerous books.

• Cecil Beaton: royal photographer

War photographer

If Beaton’s reputation was dented by the antisemitism scandal, it was in part rehabilitated by the advent of war in September 1939. He was recruited into the Ministry of Information and tasked with creating propaganda photos. At first these focused on the Home Front, especially during the Battle of Britain (10 July until 31 October 1940) and the Blitz (7 September 1940 to 11 May 1941). This section of the show features a fashionably dressed young woman set against a completely bombed-out London building.

But the star of the section is the iconic photo Beaton took of 3-year-old Blitz victim Eileen Dunne recovering in hospital, clutching her beloved teddy bear. When the image was published, America had not yet joined the war, but images like this did much to create the climate of public opinion in the States favourable to lending Britain arms and materiel.

The Men Who Fly Planes by Cecil Beaton (1941) The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, London

I haven’t really brought out Beaton’s work rate. You don’t become the leading fashion photographer of your age by accident. It took a lot of hard work, ambition and commitment, honing your craft, maintaining contacts and delivering the goods. And the point of mentioning this now is that when the war came, Beaton applied the same commitment and work rate to his war work. At first on the domestic subjects of the Blitz and air battle but, once it was possible, he travelled beyond Britain to other theatres of war, to document all aspects of the war effort: from the shipyards of Tyneside to the Middle East and then the Far East to record the war against Japan.

In total Beaton took some 7,000 photographs for the Ministry of Information covering all aspects of the Second World War, and produced an impressive ten books with titles like ‘History Under Fire’ and ‘Air of Glory’. Like so many other aspects of Beaton’s career this one, too, has been the subject of an exhibition, held, appropriately enough, at the Imperial War Museum.

• Cecil Beaton: war photographer

So much so that I wondered: why is there a whole section devoted to Beaton’s war photography in an exhibition about fashion?

Two country homes: Ashcombe and Reddish

The exhibition takes another digression away from purely fashion shoots to devote a room to Beaton’s two homes. From 1930 to 1945, Beaton leased Ashcombe House in Wiltshire. It was a small, elegant house, undisturbed for years and Beaton lavished years of care, decorating and adorning it with tasteful theatricality, and it became a venue for hosting his many friends in the arts.

Unfortunately, when the lease expired in 1945 it couldn’t be renewed, so he was bereft for a few years. Then, in 1947, he discovered Reddish House, a ‘miniature Queen Anne jewel-box of a house’, set in a couple of acres of gardens, a few miles east of the village of Broad Chalke.

Here he transformed the interior, adding rooms on the eastern side, extending the parlour southwards, and introducing many new fittings. Once again, it became a venue for visitors, friends and celebrities, not least his sometime inamorata, Greta Garbo (the very improbable affair between Beaton and Garbo lasted from 1946 to 1960). Grand personages for a quiet English backwater. Beaton remained at the house until his death in 1980 and is buried in the parish church graveyard.

State and film design

In Britain, the end of the war saw a continuation of rationing and austerity. The most obvious change in Beaton’s world was the advent of colour photography. During the 1930s colour image making was a labour-intensive exercise and Beaton wasn’t fond of it. Technological advancements in colour reproduction had been led by The Condé Nast Publications at its state-of-the-art printing works outside New York so that Vogue was at the cutting edge. The curators claim that Beaton made some of his most
impressive fashion photographs in colour, usually within his trademark stylised format. Frankly, I’m not so sure.

The room of post-war colour photos seemed to me by far the weakest. His colour photos lack the style, precision and thrilling modernity of the black and white ones. I can think of no better way of saying it than that the subjects in the 1920s and ’30s black-and-white images look like flawless gods and legends whereas the people in his colour photos look like people, freckles and skin blemishes and all. Here’s one of his solo colour portraits from just after the war. Nicely staged and lit and everything, but… plain. Amazing dress, lovely little bouquets etc… But lacking any oomph.

At the Tuxedo Ball (Nancy Harris) by Cecil Beaton (1946) The Condé Nast Archive, New York

He’s a lot better when he can arrange his figures into the kind of idealised, stylised Edwardian drawing room ambience which became his post-war brand, as here, less close-up, more stylised. Like a set design.

Worldly Colour (Charles James evening dresses) by Cecil Beaton (1948) The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive

Designer for stage and screen

Possibly this is why his post-war career took a detour away from photography back towards his first love of the stage, costumes and theatrical design. Immediately after the war, in 1946, he designed sets, costumes and lighting for a 1946 revival of Lady Windermere’s Fan, in which he also acted. Eight years later, in 1956, he won plaudits for the costumes he designed for Alan Jay Lerner (lyricist and librettist) and Frederick Loewe (composer)’s musical play ‘My Fair Lady’. The association led to the invitation to be designer to the Lerner and Loewe film musical, ‘Gigi’, in 1958. And then, the climax of his career, to design costumes for the award-winning movie version of the play, ‘My Fair Lady’, released in 1964. Astonishingly, Beaton won an Academy Award for Best Costume Design for both these movies.

The last room in the exhibition is devoted to Beaton’s designs for and photos of the stars of ‘My Fair Lady’, not least a montage of shots of the incomparable Audrey Hepburn, along with a couple of the original star of the stage production, Rex Harrison, and the young actress who made the part onstage but was dropped in favour of Hepburn, Julie Andrews (note the roses).

Celebrities

As mentioned, before the war it’s mostly debutante and fashion photos of the 1920s and ’30s are of people we’ve never heard of (apart from the Royals). It’s after the war, when he went to work in America, that Beaton started shooting celebrity actors and performers in large numbers. Thus the exhibition includes memorable portraits of:

• John Wayne
• Gary Cooper
• Fred Astaire
• Katherine Hepburn
• Buster Keaton
• Johnny Weismuller
• Marlon Brando
• Yul Brynner
• Joan Crawford
• Elizabeth Taylor
• Marilyn Monroe

Artists:

• Salvador and Gala Dali
• Lucien Freud
• Francis Bacon

Comments

1. Absence of analysis

Exhibition curator Robin Muir is quoted as saying ‘Beaton’s impact spans the worlds of fashion, photography and design.’ OK. Why? How? Explain what lasting impact he had on 1) fashion, 2) photography, 3) design. What, exactly, were his, say, three major innovations in photography?

I was surprised at the lack of analysis of any of this. Blank assertion a-plenty – he was ‘one of the leading visionary forces of the British twentieth century’, he ‘made a lasting contribution to the artistic lives of New York, Paris and Hollywood’ and so on. Yes, but how exactly? In what way did he ‘mould the visual style between the wars’? Why exactly was he called ‘the King of Vogue’? What was it about his compositions or lighting, his arrangement of models and so on, that defined the age?

The wall captions overflow with names of all the sitters, who they were and who they married or divorced – there’s no end of celebrity tittle-tattle, so that much of the exhibition reads like a society gossip column from a hundred years ago:

Marjorie Seely Blossom (1890-1969) divided her time between New York, Palm Beach and Biarritz, where she cultivated a much-admired rose garden. In a letter to Beaton, Diana Vreeland praised Mrs Wilson as ‘the most divinely beautiful woman that ever was’.

Or:

Lady Mendl, the former Elsie de Wolfe (1865-1950), was married late in life and to the surprise of friends, to Sir Charles Mendl, press attaché at the British Embassy in Paris. They kept separate
residences but entertained together. An interior decorator of influence, Lady Mendl sits in the circular hall of her Paris home in a blue taffeta dress by Mainbocher. Beaton considered her ‘a woman of unquenchable vitality… a living factory of chic.’

There’s hundreds of miles of this stuff. But insights into the precise nature of Beaton’s innovations and discoveries, what his look consisted of and why it was so influential, or indeed an outline of the main developments in fashion during the 1920s and ’30s – disappointingly little.

2. Comparison with Lee Miller

It’s a happy coincidence that the Beaton exhibition (ends January 2026) is running in parallel with Tate Britain’s exhibition of another pioneering twentieth century photographer, Lee Miller (running until February 2026).

In a nutshell, I think Miller is incomparably the greater photographer and artist. While Beaton had a good eye as a photographer, Lee was a genius. Presumably the Beaton has been carefully curated to be the best of the best and so I was very surprised that quite a few of the photos were actually poor. Some seemed to fail the elementary test of being in focus. Many of the post-war colour images seemed to me clumsy and graceless.

Installation view of Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World at the National Portrait Gallery showing four of Beaton’s colour photos from the 1940s

Many of the debutante photos and, of course, the Royal portraits, are nice. Nicely composed, chaste and demure, cascades of roses complementing billowing dresses etc. I take the point that the style he developed took a lot of effort and flair and so on but they are all, essentially, conservative, in subject matter (all those posh debutantes) and feel and style. Beaton adapted the feeblest British aftershocks of surrealism into his vision, tame and well mannered.

By contrast, Miller went to the heart of the Parisian avant-garde, tracking down and buttonholing Man Ray and forcing herself to become his collaborator and lover. With him she developed dazzling new ways of seeing and using photography (notably the famous solarising technique). The nudes she did in the studio with Man Ray invented new types of beauty, took the concept of the nude to new places. Her surrealist shots of Paris street scenes are inspired. Her war photography was inspired. She not only had a dazzlingly good eye but was brave in the face of actual combat in a way most of us can’t imagine.

For all that Beaton is photographed smiling and larking around, his humour comes over very little in his actual work, whereas Lee Miller’s quirky surreal take on the world comes over in scores of her images.

Maybe Beaton’s concoction from various elements of a sort of modernised Edwardian elegance for the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s was very influential in his day, in fact for a generation – but it is, all of it, tame and contained and good mannered. While Miller blew the lid off photography not once but several times, with the searing intensity of genius.

I know they come from different worlds and are doing different things. ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ is a very good, very interesting and very entertaining exhibition. But almost anything by Lee Miller blows it out of the water.

Related links

• Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World continues at the National Portrait Gallery until 11 January 2026
• Cecil Beaton merchandise
• The Life and Work of Cecil Beaton

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