12/31/2025
National Portrait Gallery
Also Cecil Beaton’s Diaries at Jermyn Street Theatre, Sunday 11 January, one performance only!
‘I have tried to make my work fantastic, whimsical and amusing... I design my own backgrounds and dresses and pose my subjects myself. That raises the photograph out of the ordinary’
Cecil Beaton was experimental from the beginning, and he owes much to the patience of his sisters, Nancy and Barbara and his mother, Esther, who would sit for him. Their family home in Hampstead and then Hyde Park Street served as his first studio, and he became inventive and resourceful with props. Curtain poles, carpets, bedsheets, and table lamps featured in these elaborate silver scenes.
Artifice, performance and a little light fiction were key to Beaton’s aspirations, not only for himself but also for his two sisters. Photographs of them were used to promote them in society, and they became celebrities, marrying into families that brought distinction to the Beatons.
Have you stepped into Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World? Comment below.
Exhibition on until 11 January 2026.
https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2025/cecil-beaton/
📸 Baba Beaton at Sussex Gardens, London, 1927 © The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, London
