Hundreds of gelatin silver studio prints by the society and theatre photographer Angus McBean (1904-90) will be sold by Lacy Scott & Knight of Bury St Edmunds in a stand-alone sale on April 12.
Close to 400 prints, many of them
signed, dated and annotated with information relating to the
performance or film to which they relate, have been consigned for
sale by McBean's life partner and studio assistant David Ball who
is now moving abroad.
The rollcall of stars who sat for
McBean in his London studio can be gleaned from a visitors' book
included in the sale containing over 1000 signatures from the 1940s
onwards.
The autographs range from silver
screen goddesses such as Marlene Dietrich and Katherine Hepburn,
revered actors John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier (who states that
the "rice puddings are excellent") to very early Beatles
signatures, written (before they developed a signature style) when
McBean shot the album cover for Please, Please
Me in the stairwell of EMI's London
headquarters.
This visitors' book will be the only
lot in the sale to carry a reserve and a published estimate
(£5000-10,000).
McBean, the subject of a touring
exhibition that began at the National Portrait Gallery in 2006,
famously photographed Vivien Leigh on countless occasions,
recording almost every stage and studio performance from 1936, when
he was invited by Ivor Novello to produce a set of production
stills for The Happy Hypocrite. The latest portraits are
from a studio sitting just three weeks before she died in
1967.
Many of these images will be offered
for sale at what was, in the last decades of his life, McBean's
local auction room. There are also a small number of studio
accessories including props and furniture made by
McBean.
McBean began a short-lived retirement
in the 1970s when he moved to Suffolk to restore a spectacular
moated house, Flemmings Hall, in Bedingfield near Eye. For ten
years he gave up work as a professional photographer, instead
choosing to give guided tours of his home and restore antiques for
the shop he and David Ball ran in Debenham. By his 80th birthday
McBean was restoring his second medieval house in the
county.
Tel: +44 (0) 1284
748623
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