Previously unseen pictures of a young and relaxed Princess Elizabeth by Cecil Beaton, one of the most celebrated of photographers, will join his formal portraits of the Queen at a major exhibition at the Victorian and Albert museum to mark the Diamond Jubilee, it was announced yesterday.
The show at the V&A draws on more than 18,000 photographs, negatives and transparencies in the V&A's collection of Beaton's royal portraits. Alongside nearly 30 years of the Queen's portraits, there will be excerpts from Beaton's diaries and letters.
Given the nature of Beaton's commission, his work was up among the most widely viewed and published photographs of the 20th century, many of the portraits will be quite familiar.
But the show's curator, Susanna Brown, said there would be items not previously exhibited, including informal snapshots of the Queen preparing for her coronation day in 1953, and the golden coach returning to the palace afterward. There will also be unexhibited shots of the wartime bomb damage to Buckingham Palace during the blitz – it was hit nine times.
Beaton prepared intensively and nervously for each sitting in an attempt to get the perfect portrait. "I think they got on very well," said Brown. "I think she [the Queen] understood that he was a real asset to them: he could really help, in terms of their public profile, and his images were circulated so widely. We tend to forget that these images were made for PR purposes; they went all over the world."
Beaton took photographs of Elizabeth at various stages of her reign: as a 16-year-old on becoming colonel-in-chief of the Grenadier Guards, at her coronation, and after the birth of each of her four children.
One unanswered question is why the final Beaton portrait of the Queen is a formal setting, in the palace's Blue Drawing Room, from 1968: why none from the 1970s, when the photographer was very much continuing to work, up until his death, in 1980?
A version of the V&A show will open at the McManus museum and gallery, in Dundee, before opening in London on 8 February; it will then tour Leeds, Norwich and Newcastle.