The Best of Beaton

[Cecil Beaton]


The Best of Beaton is an anthology of Beaton’s “best” photographs from 1922 to date. Reproductions of over three hundred photographs, presented chronologically, provide an objective overview of a hugely-varied, successful and influential photographic career. Chapters include ‘First Stages’, ‘Early Cinema’, ‘Travel’, ‘Fashions of the late Twenties and Thirties’, ‘Branches, Stalks and Stems’, ‘Creative People’, ‘The Performing Artists’, ‘War’, ‘War Fashions and After’, ‘Time Sequences’, ‘Personages’, ‘Charivari’, and ‘The Future Past’. Each chapter begins with a short commentary text by Beaton; pithy and witty stories of how the pictures were made, the sitters, the locations and the technical challenges. Truman Capote provides a “glowing tribute” in his introduction.


Cecil Beaton. Introduction by Truman Capote. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. London. 1968. First edition. Hardback, quarto; black cloth-bound boards, silver title to spine, dust jacket. 248 pages. 300 black-and-white and 8 colour images. English. 310 x 235mm. 1.6kg. . Very good, in very good dust jacket; slight shelf wear to jacket, slight ruffling to spine ends and forecorners, small 1cm tear and some creasing to lower edge of front panel, not price-clipped; small bump to lower edge of rear board, light mottling to surface of boards.