Cecil Beaton (1904-1980)

An album of twenty silver prints, mounted one to a page. The majority captioned with sitters' names and/or places visited in pencil on the album pages. The front free endpaper annotated 'Photos by Cecil Beaton' in the same hand. Original cloth-covered boards. Titled and dated on the upper cover. Large 4to.

Property of a Lady.
By direct descent to the present owner.

The sitters are David Herbert, Armand de la Rochefoucauld, Daisy Fellowes and her daughter Rosamond Fellowes (in whose hand the captions are written). The album includes three self-portraits by Beaton.

Daisy Fellowes, an heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune, is acknowledged as having been one of the 20th century's most stylish and glamorous women. Born in Paris in 1890 of American and French descent, she was from the 1920s onwards an uncrowned queen of the social scene and a leader of fashion as editor-in-chief of French Harper's Bazaar and major patron of couturier Elsa Schiaparelli. After a brief first marriage to Jean Amédée Marie Anatole, Prince de Broglie, she married the Hon. Reginald Ailwyn Fellowes, a banker cousin of Winston Churchill, in 1919. Daisy and Reginald Fellowes led a glamorous and highly social life, flitting between their homes in fashionable locations such as Paris and Cap Martin on the Riviera. They hosted numerous parties on their yacht, the Sister Anne.