#beaton

The telephone rang. “This is the lady-in-waiting speaking. The Queen wants to know if you will photograph her tomorrow afternoon” … In choosing me to take her photographs, the Queen made a daring innovation. It is inconceivable that her predecessor would have summoned me – my work was still considered revolutionary and unconventional.

- Cecil Beaton

Sir Cecil Beaton (1904 – 1980) was one of the leading portrait and fashion photographers of the early twentieth century. He was also the official court photographer for the British royal family.

Beaton’s royal portraits were among the most widely published photographs of the 20th century. Queen Elizabeth II was a teenage princess when she first sat for Beaton in 1942.

In one of Beaton's 145 diaries he describes his anxieties about taking the official photographs for the Queen's coronation, though the lavish images show that he rose to the challenge. Before his final shoot with the Queen in 1968, Beaton fretted in his diary: "The difficulties are great. Our point of view, our tastes are so different. The result is a compromise between two people and the fates play a large part."

Though he continued to photograph members of the royal family until the late 70s, he lost his place as pre-eminent royal photographer to Antony Armstrong-Jones (later Lord Snowdon), who married Princess Margaret in 1960 – "so he was the obvious choice".

Beaton nonetheless threw himself into the popular culture of the day. He had a whole new lease of life in his 60s.

Indeed Beaton was renowned for his images of elegance, glamour, and style and became Vogue’s first star photographer. He took his first pictures for the magazine in 1924 and continued to work with them for over 30 years.

Although he’s best known for his photography, Beaton was also a successful set and costume designer for stage and film productions, most notably My Fair Lady (1956) and Gigi (1958).

When the Greek poet George Seferis rose to give his speech on being awarded the 1963 Nobel prize for literature, he asserted that the Swedish Academy’s honour was not so much for him as for the language in which he wrote: “A language famous through the centuries, but not widespread in its present form.” The peoples who have spoken it in one version or another over the past 3,500 years are the subject of Roderick Beaton’s magisterial new book. He writes: “The Greeks of the title and the pages that follow are to be understood as speakers of the Greek language.”

This language used to be very widespread indeed; and served as a lingua franca, so to speakas it were, across polities and cultures. At its peak, the Hellenistic world stretched from beyond the Hindu Kush mountains in today’s Pakistan to the south of France, its scope revealed in place names that endure to this day. Alexandria, Naples, Nice – all are legacies of a world that used to be, in some sense, “Greek”. Consider the Septuagint, the third and second-century BC Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. Done in Egypt, it met a need among Egyptian Jews, losing touch with Hebrew, for an intelligible version of the original text. And as in so many other times and places, intelligible meant Greek.