Photo insight
With a large dash of style and theatrics, Cecil Beaton brought a whole new image to the Royal family and created one of the most memorable and powerful pictures of monarchy the world has ever seen, says
So long as you do a good job, one portrait shoot might turn into two when the friends of your sitter get to see what magic you have conjured. As that social circle shares your contact details you’ll be asked to do a cousin’s wedding, a christening perhaps, a family group shot and before you know it you’re photographing the coronation of their eldest daughter. That may not be exactly how things progressed for British fashion photographer Cecil Beaton after he received that first call from a lady-inwaiting, but he quickly became a favourite photographer of Queen Elizabeth’s well before he was asked to photograph the official coronation pictures of her daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, on 2 June 1953.
At the time, Beaton was a well-known fashion photographer, working for Condé Nast and covering Vogue magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, and had demonstrated an artistic and dramatic style that evoked, and still evokes, a sense of grand theatre. Indeed, he managed to make the Blitz look romantic when working for the Ministry of Information during the war, and Beaton’s portraits of the Royal family were considered important weapons during WWII, both to intimidate the enemy and to bolster the support and enthusiasm of the public – and it’s easy to see how that worked.
Having left London in 1928 to seek his fortune in New York (a fortune he seems to have well and truly found) he came home again in 1938 with his tail between his legs after being fired by Condé Nast for inserting anti-Semitic phrases into an illustration on New York society for the US version of Vogue. These days a tweet from one’s teen years can revisit to bite your backside and ruin your career, but in 1938 things were different. Once back in London it didn’t take long for him to be called upon to photograph the Queen in Buckingham Palace as the country slid towards war with Germany. In fact, such were the times, or such was his talent, that less than two years after being fired by Condé Nast the publisher re-hired him. Beaton’s sins, which had cost the reprint of an entire issue of Vogue, were, it seems, quickly forgiven.
When asked to photograph Princess Elizabeth directly after her coronation, Beaton sharpened all his theatrical skills to create an image that’s more fairy tale than portrait. It isn’t so much a picture of Queen Elizabeth II as it is a picture of the idea of what a queen should be. If theatre can be defined as a space in which actors perform before a constructed background, this fits the bill. The impossibly grand and romantic background view of the Henry VII Lady Chapel in Westminster Abbey is actually a painted canvas – the pictures were taken in Buckingham Palace once the party had returned from the Abbey. The throne, the curtain and the Queen are real, but the sitting is fabricated to represent an ideal rather than to be a strict document of the occasion. It is, I suppose, a form of propaganda – propaganda that’s extremely effective and of the sort I’m very happy to fall for.
There’s a remarkable gulf in style between the pictures Beaton took of Queen Elizabeth II and those that were shot of the previous coronation in 1937. Hay Wrightson was given the job of recording the official pictures of George VI and, as much as he did a decent job of it, the rather static photographs could be of a high-society wedding. Wrightson’s portraiture generally is in a much more traditional vein and is more factual. He also had been a Royal regular, but employed a style somewhat devoid of Beaton’s flamboyance. The switch to Beaton as the royal favourite, as early as 1938, brought about a remarkable change of direction in the type of images the Royal family released to the press. It was felt this change was needed to present a new image for the Royals after the catastrophic abdication of Edward VIII at the end of 1936. Beaton also photographed the former king – now Edward the Duke of Windsor – and Wallis Simpson the day before their wedding six months after the abdication. These though were much simpler, low-key portraits when viewed alongside those he had been used to shooting for Vogue as well as those he would go on to shoot of Queen Elizabeth and Princess Elizabeth in the coming years.
Beaton’s remarkable collection of photographs of the Royal family were shown at the V&A in 2012 to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee, and together they present the complete picture of how his portrayal of the family, and of the Queen in particular, has shaped the way the world sees them today – well, before their recent dramas at least. Perhaps we need to bring Beaton back from the dead.
BBC Sounds has an interesting edition of Desert Island Discs with Beaton as the guest that was recorded days before he died in January 1980.