Editorial Introduction by Mark Holborn and an essay by Annie Leibovitz Cecil Beaton's sense of style and his much-celebrated career as a designer for film and stage have come to overshadow his position as one of the great photographers of the twentieth century. Beaton's persona provided a mask that concealed the seriousness of his accomplishment. Looking back from his final working years in the seventies to the beginnings of his photography in the twenties, we discover much more than a social record. By mid-century he had shed much of the theatricality to produce an astonishing array of portraits of the greatest creative figures of his time, including Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. In some of this work there is evidence of a sparse modernity in his extraordinary eye. From his earliest memory Beaton was an obsessive photo collector. Through his teenage years his sisters served as models. He was to become a star for Vogue on both sides of the Atlantic and revelled in Hollywood glamour.

For a period he was heavily influenced by surrealism, but over time the props started to disappear. By the sixties he was engaged with the Rolling Stones in Marrakech and with Mick Jagger on the set of Performance . All the while he continued as the great royal portraitist. This book is a reassessment of the complete photographic work, spanning six decades, mostly drawn from the 100,000 prints and negatives in the Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby's. It follows the definitive monograph of his work during the war years, Theatre of War , published by Jonathan Cape in 2012.