You're all invited to Cecil Beaton's Garden Party

In 1937, society photographer Cecil Beaton (1904–1980) threw the party of his life. Three hundred guests arrived in masks and costumes for his fête champêtre garden party at his country pile in Cranborne Chase, Wiltshire. Birdcages hung in the topiary, swags of roses filled his studio and garlands of paper flowers festooned the house and garden. Beaton greeted guests wearing a pink corduroy frock coat he had designed himself, decorated with chiffon roses, tufted leaves and broken eggshells. It was a year after London’s International Surrealist Exhibition — and Beaton was in thrall to the Surrealists. Salvador Dalí even sourced him a rabbit mask to complete his outfit.

Beaton studied at Cambridge in the 1920s; he left without a degree, but with an address book bursting with Bright Young Things. By the time of his party his photographs were appearing in Vogue on both sides of the Atlantic and he was soon to be appointed official court photographer to the Royal Family. But, as this small yet illuminating exhibition reveals, there was far more to Beaton than his photographic eye.

The space given over to Cecil Beaton’s Garden Party at the Garden Museum is smaller than Beaton’s own drawing room, but its intimacy is its trump card. For it is as if we have stepped inside one of his photographs and entered his personal world. The interior is germolene pink, every display case is skirted in floral fabric and painted roses climb the walls. There’s tinfoil behind photographic displays and fake flowers everywhere. The result is over-the-top and theatrical, a chintzy camp spectacle, which makes it a fitting tribute to the waspish Beaton and his enduring love of all things floral.

If the exhibition occasionally takes a wrong turn — presenting his official war photographs in evacuees’ suitcases complete with shiny cellophane and everlasting lilies — then so too did Beaton. He was sacked from American Vogue for antisemitism as the Second World War loomed. His career threatened to sink without trace before a royal life ring was thrown in the shape of a floral photo shoot with Queen Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother).

For a retrospective of Beaton’s photographs you will have to wait for the National Portrait Gallery’s Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World this autumn. Instead the Garden Museum’s exhibition offers an intimate portrait of Beaton for whom flowers were an enduring creative inspiration. Loosely chronological, it maps his life at his two country homes, Ashcombe House and later Reddish House in Broad Chalke, where he moved after the war (Country Life photographed the interior for the March 28, 1957 issue).

We can peek in his diaries, read letters to and from friends about his garden plans and contemplate his still-life paintings of nasturtiums and roses. It also brings to the fore sketches of floral costumes for the ballets and musicals he designed, including his work on My Fair Lady (both stage and screen). He won an Academy Award for best costume design and his Oscar is included next to Audrey Hepburn’s congratulatory letter: ‘Just to say how happy happy happy happy happy I am that you received your Oscar. I wish you could have heard the applause.’

‘Cecil Beaton’s Garden Party’ is open now until September 21; admission from £15