Cecil Beaton (14 January 1904 – 18 January 1980) was a British photographer, costume designer, and author whose career spanned from the 1920s to the 1970s. He photographed and wrote about many of the same figures who populate the Cartier client list of the mid-twentieth century, and his observations and images appear in historical accounts of the period.
His connection to the Cartier story is primarily that of witness and chronicler rather than client. He photographed Daisy Fellowes wearing the Collier Hindou, one of Cartier's most celebrated Tutti Frutti creations, in 1937, a photograph that has become one of the most reproduced images of the necklace. He was also among the social world that surrounded Jeanne Toussaint, Cartier's creative director, and left a vivid account of her apartment on the Place d'Iéna: "This apartment," Beaton wrote in The Glass of Fashion, "is like a secret that few are privileged to share." The remark captures something of the atmosphere Toussaint cultivated around herself and around the objects she chose.
Beaton's written work, particularly The Glass of Fashion (1954), also provides a perspective on the Edwardian era that Cartier helped to supply. He remarked that after "the monotony which had blanketed London in the latter years of the Victorian reign, there was to be a brief decade of dazzling seasons," a characterisation of the Edwardian moment to which Cartier's arrival in London was closely tied.
He appears in the photographic record of the period in multiple capacities: documenting figures such as Iya Abdy, who was photographed by both Man Ray and Beaton, and whose Egyptian brooch appeared in Vogue in December 1928. He was present at or adjacent to many of the occasions where Cartier jewellery was being worn and observed.
The book treats Beaton primarily as a figure who documented the era: his photographs are a visual source for the Cartier-wearing world of the 1930s through the 1960s, and his published writings provide first-hand impressions of some of its key personalities.
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019), ch. 3 ("Coronation Fever: 1902–1910"), ch. 7 ("Never Copy, Only Create: The 1920s"), ch. 9 ("A New King and a New War: 1936–1944"), and ch. 10 ("Cousins in Austerity, 1945–1956")
- Cecil Beaton, The Glass of Fashion: A Personal History of Fifty Years of Changing Tastes and the People Who Have Inspired Them (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1954)
- Wikipedia: Cecil Beaton
