Cecil Beaton: terrible snob, wonderful art photographer

Cecil Beaton (1904–1980) was born in London and received his first camera at 11. He studied history, art and architecture at St John's College Cambridge, and continued as a keen amateur photographer throughout univer­s­ity.

It was under the patronage of Osbert Sitwell that Beaton put on his first and very successful exhibition in a London gallery. He designed book jackets and photography at the studio of Paul Tanqueray, until Vogue took him on regularly in 1927.

 

Portrait of Cecil Beaton
by whom?

Contacts were everything, especially when Beaton set up his own studio and found that one of his earliest clients and best friends was Stephen Tennant. Stephen Tenant had a wonderful sexual affair with Siegfried Sassoon from the late 1920s to the early 1930s. Stephen Tennant also inspired and assisted Cecil Beaton for many years and was the lover on whom Beaton modelled himself. In 1930 Beaton met art collector Peter Watson, who Truman Cap­ote described as the only great love of Beaton’s life for at least four years. Later Greta Garbo declared her love and sexual passion for Cecil and apparently they discussed marriage.

Beaton's photographs of Tennant and his circle are considered some of the best images of the Bright Young Things in the inter-war era. Friends yes, but equals perhaps not. Bejamin Wild, the author of A Life in Fashion: The Wardrobe of Cec­il Beaton 2016, wrote the Bright Young Things were the bohemian sons and daughters of aristocrats, pleasure-seeking youths who shocked London with their carousing in the 1920s. Without them, Beaton could not have dressed as he did, in a way that would be alternatively loved and ridiculed. But with them, Beaton struggled with his inability to achieve aristocratic status for himself.

The royal wedding 1937

at Château de Candé, France

by Cecil Beaton

Because I am concentrating on Beaton’s most influential era (1925-50), I was particularly interested in where he lived and how he entertained many famous people. From 1930 to 1945, Beaton leased Ashcombe House in Wiltshire. He was a photographer for the British edition of Vogue in 1931 when George Hoyningen-Huene, photo­grapher for the French Vogue, travelled to the UK. The exchange of ideas between this coll­egiate circle of artists from Europe and North America usually happened in Ashcombe, giving rise to the sophist­icated 1930s look.

Beaton was often invited to photograph his beloved Royal Family for official purp­oses. When the Duke of Windsor married his divorcee at the French Château de Candé in 1937, no members of the royal family attended, but Beaton WAS there! After the abdication, Queen Elizab­eth, wife of King George VI, was his favourite model.

Believing that he would be admired on the other side of the Atlantic, Beaton left for New York in order to boost his international career. Was he a highly skilled technical photographer? Benjamin Wild thought not. Beaton focused instead on staging a compelling model or scene, especially fashion photographs, and Hollywood or society portraits. Vanity Fair and Vogue loved his images.

Fortunately he had a long term contract with Condé Nast Publicat­ions to take photographs exclusively for them for several thousand pounds a year. But in 1938 Beaton was fired from the American edition of Vogue when he included nasty anti-Semitic text next to his images.

Marlene Dietrich, 1935

by Cecil Beaton

Again fortunately, the Queen Elizabeth/later Queen Mother found him a job at the Ministry of Information just as he returned to Brit­ain in 1939 as WW2 broke out. He became a leading war photographer recording 7,000 images from the home front, especially images of the damage done by the German blitz. And the suffering. Beaton's reputation was eventually restored, as can later be seen in a 2012 exhibition of his war photos in the Imperial War Museum, London.

After the war ended, he bought Reddish House in Wiltshire in 1947, set in 2.5 acres of gardens. Here he transformed the interior, adding rooms on the east side, extending the parlour south and introducing many new fittings. Greta Garbo was a regular visitor. Photographer David Bailey was infl­uenced by Beaton when they met while working for British Vogue in the early 1960s.

Beaton remained at Reddish House until his death in 1980 and was buried in the local church. Cecil Beaton at Home: An Interior Life by Andrew Ginger (Rizzoli, 2016) will prove fascinating to readers who are interested in Beaton’s houses, relationships, works of art, fashions and interior designs.

I knew about Beaton’s photographic legacy in Vogue and other magaz­ines, of course, but I didn’t know (or had forgotten) about the Nat­ional Port­rait Gallery in London - in the 1960s Beaton gave the National Portrait Gallery a gift of 240 prints for its collection. His beautifully captured portraits ranged across 50 years of fashion, art and celebrity, from the Sitwells in the 1920s, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiap­arelli, Salvador Dali, Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe, to the Rolling Stones. Plus the more sombre war works.

Readers should seek the books from Sir Roy Strong's very special exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 1968 and the 2004 exhibition called Cecil Beaton Portraits. Beaton: Portraits by Terence Pepper, Roy Strong and Peter Conrad, Yale University Press, 2004 is excellent.

Marilyn Munroe, 1956

by Cecil Beaton

He may have been an appalling snob, a want-to-be aristocrat, an anti-Semite and a grovelling monarchist, but Beaton's skills made him one of the earliest Englishmen who saw photography as a form of modern art.