On the Beaton track
Jun 09, 2021
3 minutes
TODAY, it is Instagram that offers curated snapshots of idealised lives, but, in the 1920s and 1930s, Cecil Beaton caught the gilded denizens of Society with a silvery magic equal to any filter. His photographs, confections of costume and chiaroscuro, capture the very characteristics that made each person worth immortalising, from Lady Edwina Mountbatten’s skin, ‘one of the most perfect complexions in London’, to the ‘fearless profile’ of aircraft designer Maxine Freeman-Thomas and Lady Diana Cooper’s ‘perfect oval’ face with lips of ‘japonica red’.
His depiction of the ‘tall, graceful scarecrow’ Edith Sitwell, who
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