Sumptuously Cecil: a new tome delves into the beguiling world of master photographer Cecil Beaton’s royal portraiture

Now, Claudia Acott Williams, Curator of Kensington Palace, is celebrating the rich heritage of Beaton’s most dazzling royal works, with her new tome, Cecil Beaton: Royal Portraits in collaboration with the V&A. 'It was quite scary. I spent some time in St. John's College, Cambridge, which is where all of his diaries and letters are, and his account of the build up to the coronation is so ludicrously hyperbolic, and over the top, he is terrified. So you do feel the burden of responsibility,’ says Acott Williams. ‘Such extraordinary people have written about him before, Robin Muir and Hugo Vickers, who was his biographer, and people are so loyal to his memory – and to his work. He has such a fan base even today, and I think there's a real resurrection of that now.’

Approached by the V&A, who own Beaton’s archive, to pen the book following an exhibition at the South Kensington landmark in 2021, Acott Williams spent over a year in a royal historian’s paradise – digging through boxes upon boxes of Beaton’s prints and negatives. ‘He really was a person of quantity. He would shoot a lot,’ confirms Acott Williams. Essentially given carte-blanche bar a few ‘must-haves’ signed off by the museum, the process was certainly a labour of love for the author. ‘It was the job of my life, just to edit it down. I had to kill a lot of my darlings in the process, because the book would have been about four times bigger than it actually is.’

The book details the life and work of a photographer obsessed with the beauty of image, and the heights of high society. Acott Williams shares a few revelations she found along the way: ‘We think of him as being such a sort of acerbic critic of other people, he's incredibly judgmental, and very bitchy, often about other people – but he also suffered with such crippling self doubt. I think when we look at his body of work now and just how well regarded he is, how incredible his work is, and how modern a lot of it still feels – it's kind of astonishing to realise just how little self confidence he had,’ she says. ‘He was incredibly insecure about his position within society and the fact that he wasn't born into an aristocratic family. He was an ashamed social climber, and obviously, monarchy was the pinnacle of that – so I think that connection with the monarchy was the sort of social affirmation that he really, really craved.

‘That was incredibly surprising, and I think a kind of nice, perennial message for everybody is that, you can come with huge insecurities, but if you're committed to your craft – and [Beaton] kept plugging away for such a long time – you can achieve magical things,’ Acott-Williams concludes.

Kensington Palace’s curator reveals that he didn’t want to be a photographer at all when he started out. ‘He really looked down on photography as a medium – he wanted to be a theatre designer. And I think that actually is what made his work so unique and what made him so well-suited to being a royal photographer, because he was very cognizant of the performative power of clothing and of image. His photography was so narrative. He wasn't interested in the actual technology itself, he was much more interested in the world that it could create,’ the author explains.

Flicking through the pages, Acott Williams hopes to share some of Beaton’s more untapped imagery, as well as celebrate the well-remembered icons. ‘I was really keen to particularly look at the sittings of people like Princess Alexandra [Lady Ogilvy], who was Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark’s daughter, because her photographs are so whimsical and romantic, but they're not seen because she's a more peripheral member of the royal family. I think at the time, she was a real kind of pin-up princess. But in recent years, people just haven't really seen them – and there are so many great ones. So, there'll be familiar ones – but then there's also, I hope, quite a lot that people won't have seen before,’ Acott Williams details, with a sparkle in her eye.

Much like Cecil Beaton himself, Claudia Acott Williams has her fingers in a lot of fabulous pies. She managed to complete this book all while still superwoman-ing between the V&A and Kensington Palace, where earlier this year she curated the much-adored Crown to Couture exhibition. As to whether her latest endeavour might one day be turned into a public display of decadence she remains tight-lipped. For now, this glorious tome will certainly do.

'Cecil Beaton: The Royal Portraits' is published by Thames & Hudson, available for purchase from 12th October 2023