A design by one of Elizabeth II’s favourite photographers is mine for less than the price of a train ticket
The week before the Queen died, I bought a tiny drawing by Cecil Beaton: a design for a yellow headdress. It’s undated, and perhaps it’s not very distinguished, though Beaton won an Oscar for the costumes he created for Gigi and My Fair Lady. But these things hardly matter to me. I love its colours – shades of green-yellow, like the wings of a goldfinch – and it cost me no more than the price of a return ticket to Manchester (a rarefied, but highly damning indictment of our railway companies, I feel).
What timing, though. Beaton was one of the Queen’s favourite photographers, a relationship that began when she was 16 – she was in pink taffeta, he was aiming to shoot her “in the manner of Gainsborough” – and which might be said to have reached its climax when he was chosen to take the official pictures at the coronation, an event for which he famously arrived hung over, a supply of sandwiches stashed inside his top hat.
