By a fine coincidence, two legendary icons of British art were being feted in London on the same evening last month, and both are primarily famous, to the public at least, for their depiction of the Queen. At the National Portrait Gallery, the director Sandy Nairne hosted a dinner to celebrate the portrait oeuvre of Lucian Freud, while the Victoria and Albert Museum opened its major exhibition of Cecil Beaton’s lifetime lensing of Elizabeth II.
In the 1950s these two artists were the epitome of London society. Beaton, by way of his groomed exquisite taste and laconic manner, was the epicene idol of sophisticated drawing rooms; the nascent Freud, 30-odd, untidy, brooding, supremely sexual, was a magnetic talisman for every smart hostess’s house, and often her bed. It is quite clear, from reading biographies of the period, that when either appeared, conversation momentarily stopped, resuming on a heightened level.
The canny Beaton recognised Freud’s allure, and soon asked him to dinner (at the V&A, the latter’s name can be seen below Henri Cartier Bresson and Francis Bacon in Beaton’s star-studded visitor’s book at one such dinner in 1951) and also to pose (something Lucian was incapable of doing, it must be said), though it is perhaps telling that the resulting photographs do not appear in this paperback; most magazines, even three decades ago, when this book was first published in hardback, preferred less gritty subjects.
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