Lady Bridget Paget

Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton was a fashion and portrait photographer, diarist, interior designer and stage and costume designer for the stage and screen. He was born in Hampstead and educated at Harrow and St John’s College, Cambridge although he left without a degree in 1925. He worked as a photographer for fashion magazines and became an extremely popular and well-connected society portraitist who also recorded the gathering of his friends among the Bright Young Things of the 20s and 30s. After the war Beaton started designing stage sets and costumes for London and Broadway. His most lauded achievement for the stage being the costume for Lerner and Loewe’s 1956 production of My Fair Lady.His first one-man show of drawings, photographs and stage designs was held in 1927. His six volumes of diaries, covering 1922-1974, are a fascinating record of artistic and society life in the 20th century. Lady Bridget Paget (nee Colebrooke) was the daughter of 1st Baron Colebrooke. One of the bright young things of the 1920s, she became the second wife of Lord Victor William Paget in 1922. They were divorced in 1931. She was one of the society set that congregated around the Pembroke family at Wilton House in the 1920s and 1930s, her cousin being the Countess of Pembroke. Other regular members of the Wilton group included Rex Whistler, Stephen Tennant and William Walton. In the 1930 Beaton photographed her dressed as a cowgirl seated beside similarly attired statues of Castor and Pollux in the grounds of Wilton. There is a blue wash portrait of a young man on the reverse.