A short life of the author
Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton CBE (14 January 1904 – 18 January 1980) was an English photographer, diarist, painter, interior designer, and costume and set designer who was, for the middle decades of the twentieth century, the supreme visual arbiter of glamour and style — a man whose photographs, stage designs, and social connections placed him at the intersection of royalty, Hollywood, high fashion, and the arts for over fifty years.
Early Life and Photographic Career
Beaton was born in Hampstead, London, into a comfortable middle-class family. He was educated at Harrow and St John’s College, Cambridge, where he contributed to university theatricals and began the lifelong project of photographing beautiful people in fantastical settings.
He made his name in the late 1920s as a society photographer for Vogue, shooting portraits of the Bright Young Things — the aristocratic, pleasure-seeking youth of interwar London — in elaborately staged tableaux that combined Art Deco styling, theatrical lighting, and an unabashed love of artifice. His early portraits of his sisters, Baba and Nancy, in settings draped with cellophane and tinfoil, announced a visual sensibility that was camp, romantic, and fiercely decorative.
Beaton became the favoured photographer of the British Royal Family, beginning with his portraits of Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother) in 1939, which reimagined the Queen as a romantic heroine in a Pre-Raphaelite garden. His coronation portraits of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 are among the most iconic images of the British monarchy.
War Photography
Beaton’s career took an unexpected turn during the Second World War, when he worked as a photographer for the Ministry of Information. His war photographs — of bombed-out London, wounded servicemen, and the North African and Far Eastern theatres — are strikingly different from his society portraits: stark, compassionate, and powerful. His photograph of three-year-old Eileen Dunne, bandaged in a hospital bed after the Blitz, was published on the cover of Life magazine and became one of the defining images of British wartime endurance.
Costume and Set Design
Beaton won two Academy Awards for costume design: for Gigi (1958) and My Fair Lady (1964). His designs for My Fair Lady — both the original Broadway production (1956) and the film — are his greatest theatrical achievement: sumptuous, historically informed, and visually ravishing, they defined the visual identity of the show and have influenced costume design ever since.
He also designed productions for the Royal Ballet, the Metropolitan Opera, and numerous West End and Broadway shows.
The Diaries
Beaton’s published diaries — six volumes covering the years 1922 to 1974 — are his most substantial literary achievement. They are vivid, malicious, observant, and extraordinarily indiscreet, offering portraits of everyone from Greta Garbo (with whom Beaton had a complicated love affair) to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, from Truman Capote to Francis Bacon.
The Unexpurgated Beaton (2003, edited by Hugo Vickers after Beaton’s death) revealed passages that had been too scandalous for earlier publication — including his descriptions of his sexual encounters with men, which he had concealed behind a veneer of heterosexual respectability throughout his lifetime.
Books
Beaton published over thirty-five books, including The Glass of Fashion (1954), a history of fashion and style; The Magic Image (1975), a history of photography; Time Exposure (1941), a wartime memoir; and Cecil Beaton’s New York (1938). His books are characterised by the same qualities as his photographs: elegance, wit, visual acuity, and an unapologetic love of the beautiful and the glamorous.
Legacy
Beaton was a figure of immense cultural influence whose visual sensibility helped define mid-century glamour. He was also, beneath the surface brilliance, a complicated and sometimes unhappy man — socially ambitious, privately bisexual in an era when this had to be concealed, and haunted by a sense that his gifts, however considerable, were decorative rather than profound. His diaries ensure that he will be read as well as looked at.
Collecting Beaton
Beaton’s photographic prints are collected as works of art and command significant prices at auction. His books — particularly The Glass of Fashion (1954) and the diary volumes — are collected in first edition. Original prints and signed photographs are the most valuable Beaton collectibles.