At London’s Garden Museum, Cecil Beaton’s Botanical Obsessions

Like many people who came from money, Cecil Beaton dabbled in many things. He was proficient at both painting and photography. He designed sets and costumes for ballets, operas and films, most famously for My Fair Lady. When he wasn’t working, he hosted lavish costume parties, first at Ashcombe House and later at Reddish House in the English countryside. There is an idleness associated with the British upper classes, but Beaton liked to keep busy.

Thankfully for visitors of London’s Garden Museum, there was a unifying vine to Beaton’s wreath of practices: gardens, flowers and horticulture. “Cecil Beaton’s Garden Party,” which opened earlier this year, is the first exhibition to focus solely on Beaton’s botanical obsessions. Curated by Emma House, the exhibition brings together objects from Beaton’s various occupations: diaries, photographs, costumes, drawings and even the Oscar he won for My Fair Lady, for which he dressed Audrey Hepburn playing cockney flower seller Eliza Doolittle.

Beaton’s trade was beauty. Indeed, the exhibition is beautiful, and there are several standouts that deserve attention, such as the artist’s black and white portraits of the Royal Family, taken in front of his own blossoming backdrops. The show also features the Surrealist rose coat he designed and wore as a party host to his ‘Fête Champêtre’ in 1937, a theatrical fancy dress summer party attended by 300 guests, including many of the ‘Bright Young Things’. (What I wouldn’t give for a time machine to go back to Beaton’s party, even if just a mere wallflower. Hell, if I were a pretty wallflower, I probably wouldn’t have gone unnoticed.)

The exhibition takes up a small corner of the Garden Museum, which itself is housed in a converted church in the Lambeth area of London. (The temptation to describe the exhibition as being ‘Off the Beaton Track’ is high, but in reality the museum is just across the Thames from the Houses of Parliament.) Though small, the exhibition has plenty of items that merit a second turn around the room. The costume sketches for My Fair Lady are particularly thrilling, as are the paintings of flowers that Beaton created throughout his life.

The look of the exhibition comes from Luke Edward Hall, a British artist and designer. There are beautiful murals painted by Hall adorning the walls of the exhibition featuring flowers and vases inspired by Beaton’s own sketches. These add character and charm to the exhibition. Less successful are the fake flowers hanging from the ceiling and Hall’s overly generous use of tinfoil: it’s laid beneath exhibition items such as letters and photographs. The rationale for the foil comes from Beaton—he used it in backdrops for his early photographs, and Hall wanted to incorporate foil into the visual framework of the exhibition. A good idea in theory, but in such a confined space, the foil looks cheap. Still, this is a small but mightily impressive show in its clear concept and execution.

The ostensible subject of “Garden Party” is, of course, flowers. But another defining characteristic is the upper classes of English life. Beaton was a prep school boy. He found his footing at Cambridge. He hosted lavish garden parties in country houses. He graced the pages of Vogue and adorned the stage of the Royal Opera House. Beauty is truth, Keats said. And truth, beauty. But there was a performativity throughout Beaton’s beautiful life. Often literally (he was, after all, a man of the theatre and opera) but also in the way he lived his life: the parties, the decadence, the lavishness—his was an ostentatious beauty that can describe all of English upper-class life.

Still, class politics aside, there is undeniable charm in chrysanthemums, geraniums and bluebells. They have inspired artists and poets for centuries. Whether sewn into the fabric of a gown or painted onto a mural, flowers continued to inspire Beaton throughout his abundant talents. Catch this exhibition while it’s still in bloom.

“Cecil Beaton’s Garden Party” is at the Garden Museum through September 21, 2025

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