Sir Cecil Beaton 1904-1980

Cecil Beaton is one of the most celebrated and distinguished British portrait photographers of the twentieth century and someone who's creativity and drive I have admired throughout my life.

An accomplished illustrator, painter, writer, costume and set designer, he is renowned for his portraits of well known faces from the worlds of fashion, literature, film and royalty. His long and varied career and his ability to attune himself to changing fashions enabled him to capture a diverse range of subjects on camera.

Marlene Dietrich - Cecil Beaton 1935

Beaton had a lifelong passion for the theatre, inspired by the plays he attended and the actresses he met in his childhood. He directed sets and costumes for 12 films and numerous plays, and his own play The Gainsborough Girls was performed at the Theatre Royal in Brighton in 1951. He first visited Hollywood in 1929 and returned many times over the years to capture the glamour of the big screen stars.

Audrey Hepburn, My Fair Lady - Cecil Beaton 1963

Amongst the celebrities captured by his camera, are fashion designers Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli and , artists Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali, screen beauties Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman, ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev and rock star Mick Jagger.

Cristóbal Balenciaga, Paris - Cecil Beaton 1962

Beaton’s career as a fashion photographer grew naturally out of his work as a society portraitist and flourished under the patronage of Vogue, first in London and Paris and by 1929, New York.

Vogue - Cecil Beaton 1954

The success he achieved in the 1930s reached its height when he was summoned to Buckingham Palace in 1939 to photograph Princess Elizabeth. The event was a great success in itself, with praise in the press for the photographs, but also the starting point for Beaton to become the Royal photographer of choice. It was he who photographed Princess Elizabeth in her uniform of Honorary Colonel of the Grenadier Guards in 1942, he who was chosen to record her coronation in 1953 and later the wedding of Princess Margaret and Anthony Armstrong-Jones.

Princess Elizabeth - Cecil Beaton March1945

In 1940 Beaton was appointed as an official photographer for the Ministry of Information. The portraits that he took at the time in themselves extended his range, beyond the glamorous and the grand to children and old men whom Beaton portrayed with clarity and sensitivity. In September 1940, Life carried Beaton’s portrait of three-year-old Blitz victim Eileen Dunne on its front cover.

Eileen Dunne in The Hospital for Sick Children - Cecil Beaton1940

Beaton remained in high demand as a photographer, but was keen to expand his practice beyond, and began to work as a costume and set designer on projects such as The Grass Harp (1952). A year later, he enrolled in a course at the Slade School of Fine Art, which allowed him to improve his painting and drawing. By the mid-1950s Beaton had firmly established himself within the field.

Artwork by Cecil Beaton, fashion designs and figure studies for - Jemma; The Divine

In 1963 Beaton met Kin (Kinmoit Hoitsma), a former Olympic fencer and a man thirty years his junior with whom he became romantically involved. His personal story is long and complicated, in some areas coloured by other people's judgment of him and he often found himself experiencing a sense of shame for his feelings.

Nevertheless, he was a talented man who left behind a wonderful legacy that influenced fashion photographers, portrait photographers and photojournalists alike. Beaton was not only influential to his contemporaries, but to his successors. Many of his photographs exude a timeless quality that could still grace a magazine cover today.

British Vogue September 1950, London-Paris Collection, cover by Cecil Beaton

Between 1955 to 1972 he earned many honours, awards and medals for his work. He published six volumes of his diaries while he was alive and was knighted in 1972. However, by the end of the 1970s, Beaton's health had faded and he passed away 18th January, 1980 just four days after his 76th birthday.

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Now if you know of a movie with more glamerous costumes than these, please let me know! Anyone who has ever sewn a stitch, should be able to appreciate the amount of work that went into producing each one of them, and hopefully you might find some inspiration.

Ascot Scene from My Fair Lady by Cecil Beaton

SEE IT COME TO LIFE

in perfect monotone with gowns and millinery to die for!

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I hope you have enjoyed this post as much as I did putting it together.

Big hugs,

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