For half a century, photographer CECIL BEATON helped modernise the royal family through a winning mix of reverence and informality, as a new book of his portraiture reveals.

Cecil Beaton photographed the British monarchy for more than 50 years. Between 1927 and 1979, barely a year went by in which one of its members was not the subject of his enchanting lens.

Beaton was by turns a witty illustrator, a prolific writer, an arbiter of style, an accomplished painter and an award-winning designer for stage and screen. Yet despite his many talents, he felt perpetually the outsider.

In the closing months of the war, amid a growing sense of optimism, the reigning family sought out the triumphal confidence of Beaton’s earlier style to help place themselves at the centre of national celebrations. Princess Elizabeth at Windsor Castle, 9 March 1945.

Princess Margaret at Clarence House, taken on 29 June 1954 and published in August 1955 to mark her 25th birthday.

Born to middle-class parents in 1904, he was, in the words of Truman Capote, ‘a total self-creation’. Throughout the 1920s, his photographs of the ‘Bright Young Things’ and judicious self-promotion enabled him to scale the social ladder. He would eventually list royalty, aristocracy and Hollywood icons among his closest acquaintances.

In November 1943, Beaton photographed the reigning family in preparation for Princess Elizabeth’s eighteenth birthday. The King and Queen with Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret at Windsor Castle, 1943.

A playful portrait of King George VI, Queen Elizabeth, Princess Margaret and their corgis at Windsor Castle, 1943. 

Although he claimed to hate the term ‘royal photographer’, it was a title he guarded fiercely; association with royalty was perhaps the social affirmation for which he always yearned.

Following the dutiful austerity of their wartime portraits, Beaton’s more intimate, less formal photos of the royal family from the 1950s onwards helped update their public image. Princess Elizabeth with Prince Charles (aged 22 months) at Clarence House, 14 September 1950. 

More concerned with his idea of the person than the person themselves, Beaton used his lens to transform his subjects, and his romantic, reverential vision would help shape the image of the British monarchy in the mid-20th century. 

Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace, 16 October 1968. She appeared in a vivid turquoise-blue dress, the Garter mantle and Queen Mary’s pearl and diamond looped tiara. 

Unlike those of his predecessors, Beaton’s photographs had to compete with the visual abundance of magazines and Hollywood movies. King George VI, Queen Elizabeth, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret at Windsor Castle, November 1943. 

Princess Marie Louise of Schleswig-Holstein, 1953. Born in 1872, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, she had witnessed six British reigns by the time this photo was taken. 

Cecil Beaton: The Royal Portraits is published by Thames & Hudson, £35. To order a copy for £29.75 with free UK delivery until 7 January, go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.