With order of service

BEATON, Cecil ~ Ashcombe – The Story of a Fifteen-Year Lease : With The Order Of Service For ‘The Memorial Service For Cecil Beaton, March 6th 1980’

First UK Printing : B. T. Batsford Ltd, London : 1949

8vo., red-brown publisher’s cloth, spine lined and lettered in gilt; upper edge orange; in the charming Batsford wrapper, with watercolour-wraparound image showing the house to both panels and spine reproduced from a painting by Rex Whistler (priced 15s. net); with colourful frontis on glossy paper; numerous in-text illustrations, head and tailpieces, and captioned black and white photographs throughout; a Very Good ++ copy, slightly sunned at tips of spine; endpapers lightly browned, spotted and offset, with some spots extending onto fore-edge and prelims; the Very Good WRAPPER spotted to flaps and toned to edges and spine; creased and rubbed along folds with some chips to head and foot, slightly larger at head of the spine, and a couple of closed tears to the upper edge (no more than 2cm in length). The wrapper is protected in a removable Brodart archival cover. First edition in the charming wrapper. This copy complete with the very scarce order of service booklet for 'The Memorial Service of Cecil Beaton 14th January 1904 - 18th January 1980', which was held on the 6th March 1980 at the Royal Parish Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, London. Situated directly across from the National Portrait Gallery, which housed Beaton’s work on a regular basis throughout his life, the service included music by Bach, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, as well as the anthem ‘Zadok the Priest’ - perhaps a reference to Beaton’s involvement with the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. A charming description of Cecil Beaton’s time at Ashcombe, a dilapidated and remote small country house in Cranbourne Chase, Wiltshire. During his fifteen years at the property, Beaton transformed the house and gardens, and the present title describes hectic weekends, dressing-up parties, and numerous photographs showing various visitors to the property over the course of his lease, including Lord Nelson, Lord and Lady Cecil, Rex Whistler and many others. Beaton was said to have been heartbroken when his lease expired in 1945, and the book remains “a tribute of gratitude to Ashcombe, a house I shall never cease to regret…to bear witness to a life that was lived by a group of intimate friends who frequented one small, eighteenth-century house in a lonely part of Wiltshire in the far-off decade before the Second World War”. A fascinating portrait of creative and artistic life in between the wars, together with the genuinely rare order of service.

BINDING: Hardcover
CONDITION: Very Good++
JACKET: Very Good