Cecil Beaton valuation
Photographed the Bright Young Things, Vogue and the royal family, and won Oscars for designing My Fair Lady.
Cecil Beaton (1904–1980) was born in Hampstead, London, and educated at Harrow and Cambridge, and he was photographing his sisters and the Bright Young Things of the 1920s in theatrical, home-made settings before Vogue took him on later in the decade.
What a work by Cecil Beaton is worth
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Bio
Cecil Beaton (1904–1980) was born in Hampstead, London, and educated at Harrow and Cambridge, and he was photographing his sisters and the Bright Young Things of the 1920s in theatrical, home-made settings before Vogue took him on later in the decade. He worked for British and American Vogue for decades. His portraits of Queen Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother, at Buckingham Palace in 1939 made him a photographer of the royal family, and he took the official coronation portraits of Elizabeth II in 1953. In the Second World War he photographed for the Ministry of Information, at home and in North Africa, the Middle East, India and China. He was also a designer for the stage and the screen, won Academy Awards for his costumes for Gigi and My Fair Lady, and was knighted in 1972.
Beaton sold his studio archive to Sotheby's in 1977, and that shapes the market. Prints made in his lifetime, often with his own studio stamp or inscriptions, are distinct from later prints made from the archive's negatives, which carry the Sotheby's studio archive stamp on the back; the two can show the same sitter in the same pose and still be very different objects. Prints from his studio assistants turn up as well, and in 2024 an archive from the estate of Geoffrey Sawyer, his assistant and printer, came to auction. Vintage prints of the royal sittings, of fashion for Vogue and of sitters such as Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn are among the most collected. The stamps, the paper and any Vogue or Condé Nast markings decide which kind of print it is.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
