Item 69: "Cecil Beaton’s ‘Photobiography’" in Vogue (June 1951)

With a long career as a designer for stage and film, Cecil Beaton nevertheless enjoyed greatest renown as a photographer, particularly for his celebrity portraits of actors, artists, and the British royals. In 1951, Vogue magazine published a photospread with highlights from his career. Among them was his portrait from the late 1930s of Beerbohm, who was unhappy with Beaton’s choice of a backdrop, but apologized for being “so fussy.” In Self-Portraits with Friends (1979)—selections from Beaton’s voluminous diaries—Beaton described his final meeting with Beerbohm, in Italy in 1953. Beerbohm “was still, in spite of his eighty years, the perennial dandy.”