Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton, born in 1904 in Hampstead, England, looked at the world and thought he could do better. “I have wonderful plans and I am going to do marvelous things,” announced the youngster. Taught how to use a camera by his nanny, educated at Harrow and Cambridge, he worked briefly in the family timber business and then proceeded to build a Beatonian brand: life as a rococo fantasy where he would craft the sets and costumes, write the essays and plays, and capture it all through his camera lens in a photographic style that married Edwardian stage portraiture and European Surrealism. With no use for the quotidian, Beaton’s visual sleight of hand turned balloons, cellophane, mirrors, paper, and vases into fantastical dreamscapes and silvery grottos, his patient sisters sitting for pictures until society came to call.
In 1927, when Beaton was just 23, his work captured the attention of Vogue’s Edna Woolman Chase, who invited him to become a contributor. That same year, Beaton’s first exhibition of photographs attracted the cream of London society, and the self-taught savant was accepted as an incandescent member of Britain’s Bright Young Things. Now open at London’s National Portrait Gallery, the exhibition “Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World” surveys the groundbreaking oeuvre of one of the 20th century’s most influential artists. More than 250 items—including photographs, letters, sketches, and costumes—showcase Beaton at his most triumphant.
