Ballet

Cecil Beaton.

Wingate. London. 1951. First edition. Hardback, octavo; purple cloth-bound boards with silver titles, dust jacket, purple top edge. 86 pages. 64 b&w hors-texte plates, numerous b&w text illustrations, colour illustrated title-page. English. 230 x 155mm. 0.5kg. . Very good, in very good dust jacket; slight wear and rubbing to jacket, slight browning to spine, spotting to verso of jacket, not price-clipped; light offsetting to endpapers, small abrasion to lower edge of rear board, no inscriptions.

Beaton's very personal account of his love affair with ballet. The book covers Beaton's lifelong interest in ballet, from watching The Palace Girls when young, through the Ballets Russes and Saddler's Wells, to designing productions for The Royal Ballet. His reminiscences and artistic comments are accompanied by his photographs and drawings of the great stars and choreographers of ballet from the first half of the 20th century - Lydia Lopokova, Leonide Massine, Tamara Karsavina, Serge Lifar, Kyra Nijinska, Margot Fonteyn, Frederick Ashton, George Balanchine, Christian Berard and Lord Berners.