Anyone anticipating this month’s first installment of the final season of “The Crown” should not miss “Cecil Beaton: The Royal Portraits,” a contemporary look at the photographer’s definitive pictures of the British royal family from their fifty-year professional collaboration.
Serving as a chronological documentation and exploring the creative process behind the cultivation of a very public image, the book illustrates not only some never-before-seen portraits, but also contextualizes the private mises-en-scène in which Beaton crafted the intimate, often ceremonial, sometimes even spontaneous images of his imperious subjects…by Claudia Acott Williams, with foreword by Hugo Vickers, $50 from Thames & Hudson.
Photograph Certainly Beaton, Cecil (Sir), Certainly Buckingham Palace, 1968
Queen Elizabeth II
Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, at Buckingham Palace below a portrait of Queen Charlotte, in 1948
Portrait of H.R.H. Princess Margaret (1930 – 2002);
by Sir Cecil Beaton (1904 – 80);
U.K. (London);
Late 1940`s.
The future King Charles III as a teenager
King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother with their daughters Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, photo Cecil Beaton. UK, 1943
One of Beaton’s most famous images is this portrait of Queen Elizabeth II in her Coronation robes, with crown, scepter and orb, against a studio backdrop of Westminster Abbey
Her Highness Princess Marie Louise (1872 – 1956), a granddaughter of Queen Victoria
