Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton CBE (1904-1980) - Sportsman in...

Hammer

£1,250

Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton CBE (1904-1980) - Sportsman in his tweeds seated on a shooting stool holding his shotgun, signed Beaton, also extensively inscribed on an Exhibition label verso, pen ink watercolour and gouache, 14.25” x 7.5”
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** Provenance, with Michael Parkin Fine Art Ltd, 11, Motcomb Street, Belgravia, London, SW1 8LB, also ex. Collection, Anthony Le Ray-Cook. “Design for Mr Nobin 1936, from The First Shoot, ballet by Osbert Sitwell. (Choreography by F. Ashton, music William Walton) (No. 153)
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** Sold together with a later typed extract from, Self Portrait With Friends, The Selected Diaries of Cecil Beaton.. 1926-1974 published by Weidefield and Nicolson 1979. The First Shoot, a collaboration with Frederick Ashton and William Walton, was included in C.B.Cochran’s 1936 revue “Follow the Sun”. Spring 1936, “My former disappointment and bitterness at not having worked for Cochran had long since been forgotten: now once more he approached me this time, the offer to decorate a ballet-which Osbert (Sitwell) had written upon a sheet of Renishaw Hall writing paper -was definite. The subject of the work involved the love complications of an Edwardian pheasant shoot. Willie Walton had composed the perversely lyrical music, and this was to be first of many collaborations with Frederick Ashton. Over lunch in a Soho restaurant Fred (Ashton) and I discussed the proposed sets and costumes, and used the menu for pencilled suggestions. More menus were called for. Before the hors d’ oeuvre had been cleared, Fred remarked somewhat wryly, “You have finished your work - it has taken twenty minutes. I still have all mine to do” His face then crinkled into that wonderfully disarming laugh. A few weeks later the stage curtains parted to reveal my first living picture in the theatre. It was a moment of exhalation for which the long wait had been well worthwhile