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I recently read Cecil Beatons endlessly entertaining diaries Ashcombe: The history of a fifteen -year rental agreementCertainly the most impressive representation of finding a house and a garden and falling in love with the paper.
It was all in preparation for an exhibition I was asked to design: Cecil Beaton's garden party, The first to research the role, played the flowers in the development of the photographer, artist, designer and the creative practice of the writer. It opens on May 14th in the London Garden Museum and a lot of rooted in two of its beloved gardens.
Ashcombe Tells the story of Beaton's love relationship with a house that looked at a fold by Wiltshire Downland for the first time in 1930 in a fall -apated building. Beaton immediately fell into the spell and described the effect as if you were “touched by a magical wand on the head”. Beaton devoted himself to a complete overhaul of the house and its garden. It became an obsession.
The artist Rex Whistler, Beaton's popular friend and a regular visitor to Ashcombe, designed a new stone door, the windows were larger and urns were added to his parapet, which was turned into a much larger affair. Outside, carloads of manure were imported from neighboring farms. Although Beaton released the enthusiasm for his new idyll and went into the garden in his name, he was not worrying in this phase of his life to get his hands too dirty: in Ashcombe He admits to enjoy himself, “a small superficial weet”.
Beaton was impatient to get his cutting garden in Ashcombe off the ground, but complained that “the color exhibition that appeared in my actions was quite disappointing”. This was a considerable setback because the flower arrangements were a “main object in the curriculum [of weekend house parties] And took several hours to ask. “He had to spend all his money on flowers on the Covent Garden.
Beaton's studio, which was housed in a former orangery opposite the main house, received a purely white decoration scheme. White walls, white furniture, white sofas. Flowers were an essential component for Beaton's vision – a large cutting garden, completely made of white flowers – was planned.
Beaton was forced to go after 15 years. It was a dagger in the heart. However, a kind of relief came through another house, another garden. Beaton moved to the nearby Reddish House in 1947, a manor house in the early 18th century. It is on reddening that Beaton really fell in love with gardening and created an incredibly romantic garden in the classic English style during his time. He planted rose and peony gardens, and the water garden, which he created on the meadow in front of the house in 1971 and is still there with his meandering walks and the lake with an island. Beaton also made his famous winter garden in Reddish and led the salon with its glass roof, the bamboo slit and a small pool in a black and white marble floor.
The art historian Sir Roy Strong visited his impression of the house for the first time in May 1967 and noticed his theatrics – “Like a series of stage sets” – “But” overlaid with cascades of flowers, not just real real real ones that were everywhere in vases, but were everywhere. “Bouquet.”
However, Beaton did not cultivate gardens for the sole purposes of pleasure and the decoration of his houses. Flowers were a central part of his projects, from his photography to his costume and theater design. The poet and patronary Edith Sitwell was called medieval portrait and in 1927 photographed a handful of lilies against a chessboard floor. In the same year, Beaton conquered his new friend Stephen Tennant and a cohort of other brilliant young things, who, as Faux Rustics in Flors Smocks and Basking Baskets Baskets Baskets Baskets Baskets Baskets, from Lawn the Lawn, Baskets on the lawn, on the Lawn basket. Beaton temporarily worked with Constance Sprys Company for the supply and arrangement of flowers, but as an experienced florist, he was mostly his own creations.
In his diary, Beaton writes about his preparations for taking pictures of the queen mother in 1953 and considering the idea “a few pictures in the [German court portraitist] Winter holder and wise, with real land flowers on a side table instead of the usual palace exhibition of hydrangeas and gladioli. as “eccentric traveler to Salisbury, which wears oversized hats that is always late and loaded with baskets”.
As Beaton's career progress, the way flowers deeply deepened in his designs. March 15, 1956 was the opening night of My beautiful woman On Broadway. Beaton had been commissioned to design the costumes; The piece was a success and the greatest triumph of his previous working life. Garden museum curator Emma House writes in the Garden party Exhibition catalog: “Flowers flow through the musical from the opening scenes of the busy flower market to decorations on individual costumes to Eliza Doolittle's Bloates Chiffon dress from the last act, the fabric of which is turned into a flower.”
The garden in the Reddish House was still added to the 1960s in the 1960s (two large wooden greenhouses were installed in 1969), and in the 1970s Beaton welcomed a stream of artists, actors and models. Jean Shrimpton and David Hockney were both photographed in the winter garden; Bianca Jagger and Greta Garbo (with Beaton's worshiped cat Timothy in the air) are relaxed and smiling and surrounded by roses on the terrace.
Beaton worked tirelessly on creative commissions for decades, and yet Marion Taylor, the wife of Beaton's last gardener Stephen Taylor, remembered, as he was still looking forward to the arrival of snowgrops in reddish. The calm blossom of a spring flower in his Wiltshire garden would have brought as much pleasure for Beaton (if not much more) than a packaging and screeching opening evening in New York.
“Cecil Beaton's garden party”, 14th May 21. September; Gardenmuseum.org
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