How Beaton made Queen look blonder and slimmer

As soon as photographer Cecil Beaton began his long association with the royal family, he used the touching-up skills honed on fashion magazines like Vogue to make them look their best.

Eagle-eyed visitors to the Diamond Jubilee exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, which opens this week, might spot photographs where either the print has been enhanced by watercolours or the original negative improved by tactics including scratching out with a sharp tool.

Curator Susanna Brown said: "Often several inches were trimmed off the waistline and every hair is pristine in place. With [princess, later Queen] Elizabeth, he lightens her hair so sometimes she appears much blonder." Beaton also made her look slimmer. "She was petite but she wasn't svelte. She appears very, very slender in some pictures."

The practice came naturally to Beaton who had worked in Hollywood and in fashion for 20 years before meeting the royals. "The pictures are not reportage shots, they are his vision of the monarchy," she said.

The 60 photographs on show alongside Beaton's diaries and letters include behind the scenes glimpses of the day of the Coronation in 1953 as well as never before seen contact sheets of scenes such as wartime bomb damage at Buckingham Palace. There is also rare colour footage of Coronation day and an amusingly reverential TV announcement of the birth of Prince Charles.

The earliest photographs show a romantic view of the royals with specially painted backdrops in the style of Rococo painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard. But he later helped present them as more modern and accessible. The Queen Mother expressed her gratitude in a letter for making them seem "quite nice and real people".

The Queen repaid his work for them by agreeing to a request to sit specially for new shots when Beaton was preparing for a major retrospective of his work at the National Portrait Gallery.

Beaton, who lived from 1904 to 1980, initially photographed the Queen Mother, and it was she who recommended him to her daughter.

The exhibition concludes with a small display of images of Beaton, taken by other famous photographers including David Bailey and Irving Penn.

Queen Elizabeth II by Cecil Beaton: A Diamond Jubilee Celebration, sponsored by Garrard, runs from Wednesday until April 22, admission £6.
www.vam.ac.uk