Camera Artist: The Portraiture of Cecil Beaton

Photographer Cecil Beaton in Paris © Jack Burlot/Apis/Sygma/Corbis

“His baroque is worse than his bite.”

—Hank Brennan of Vogue

Amid the discarded garments, feather boas, parasols and scarves littering the canopy bed, a young Cecil Beaton, just sent down from Cambridge, watched his mother at her dressing table as she pinned a lily to the bodice of her dress. He reveled in the delicacy of her beauty and the pageantry of dressing up. The gown he had selected for her was pale green matte crêpe and embroidered with crystals. She wore a diamond headdress with leaves. As Cecil snapped pictures of her reflection in the triptych mirror with his Brownie box camera, he repeated his mantra: “I don’t have a middle-class bone in my body.”

Cecil loved his mother better than anyone in the world, and when he was a child he’d imagined that she was a great woman of society. Later, when he found out that she was just a suburban housewife in plain flaxen dresses, he resolved to improve her.

Cecil was not like his friends from college who could afford to lead footloose lives. He knew that his photographs were technically weak, but he also knew he had flair, and an eye for detail, and that he was inventive. He could learn to develop the rest.

Born in middle-class Hampstead, the grandson of a blacksmith, Cecil Beaton was a self-creation. In many ways no one was more determined and disciplined than he. His head ruled his heart, though at the same time he could be thoroughly lost in every project. Truman Capote felt that Beaton was one of the “three or four best photographers in this century.” Others, less generously, thought he had fashion-plate talent; his photos weren’t great art, merely great fun. Friends, family and critics alike, though, agreed that he worshipped beauty and had the energy to seek it out. Like all great photographers, he was blessed with curiosity and visual intelligence. He also had the good sense to imitate and pick up ideas from anyone who interested him.

Cecil was born to Ernest and Esther (Etty) Beaton on January 14, 1904, in a house he later described as small, redbrick and of indiscriminate taste. He was baptized Cecil Hardy Beaton, a name he thought suggestive of a tenacious plant. He was the eldest of four children, with a brother, Reginald, and two sisters whom he adored and loved to dress, Nancy and Barbara.

His initial interest in photography came from the picture postcards of theatrical heroines that he collected from local stationery shops. His collection grew to include many leading ladies of the day—Lily Elsie, Gertie Millar, Florence Smithson, Gaby Deslys—and inspired an early love of

T. S. Eliot

© Condé Nast Archive/Corbis

The Sitwells

© Condé Nast Archive/Corbis

theater. His heart raced when he examined the weekly magazines for the latest ladies’ fashions: extraordinary clothes and hats and hairstyles. Soon his collection expanded to include photographs of stage and set designs, which he studied through a magnifying glass, hoping to discover how the sets were put together. Whenever his father, also a theater buff, returned from a New York business trip, he brought Cecil bundles of playbills and theatrical magazines.

For ten years the family lived at Temple Court in Hampstead. Beaton’s father’s timber business was thriving; his mother tended her rose garden; his brother, Reggie, practiced cricket; and his younger sisters wheeled their dolls in their prams while Cecil experimented with his first camera, taking family snapshots. The idyll was disrupted when he entered Heath Mount Preparatory School. Though it was the best in the neighborhood, he learned to dread it. The headmaster was cruel, and Beaton’s classmates were bullies. The group of torturers was led by a slightly older classmate, Evelyn Waugh, who in 1964 recalled in his memoir, A Little Learning, “The tears...