Dorothy Wilding: The Pursuit of Perfection by Terence Pepper

Dorothy Wilding: The Pursuit of Perfection Reviews

• 
  Gerry

  Dorothy Wilding was born at Longford, near Gloucester, on 10 January 1893 and she purchased her first camera and tripod when aged 16.
  
  She moved to London to take an apprenticeship with the retoucher Ernest Chandler, who was attached to the portraitist H Walter Barnett of Knightsbridge. She also worked for other London photographers so as to save enough money to open her own studio. This she did at age 21 when she leased 67 George Street, off Portman Square, where she also lived. She used economy furniture for props in her studio and adapted an adjacent room as a dark room. Her first subjects came from her small circle of London friends.
  
  As she expanded she moved to larger premises at 264 Regent Street where she had advertising space on the ground floor to display examples of her work. And her 'camera portraits' became very popular, so much so that she began to attract influential clientele. Dancers such as Lydia Lopokova and Seratina Astafieva, Ninette de Valois and Tamara Karasavina were among her early subjects and once she had photographed Matheson Lang she became much wanted as a theatrical photographer.
  
  After five years of success she moved to grander premises in Bond Street, which she described as 'the most chic spot in the whole world ... the only goal for me'. And it was from there that she photographed one group of sitters that had previously eluded her, 'the decorative leisured class'. And in 1925 she produced my favourite portrait of hers, Cecil Beaton in costume for the Cambridge Footlights revue 'All the Vogue'.
  
  As her fame spread, she began exhibiting her work at a number of photographic salons both in England and abroad and she undertook commercial and advertising work to increase her presence; one of her more surreal, but delightful, photographs in that field was her advertisement for stockings that was shown at the Professional Photographers Association exhibition, 'Photography in Commerce' in 1935.
  
  She produced portraits of such as Tallulah Bankhead, Gladys Cooper, Noel Coward, Maurice Chevalier, the Prince of Wales (and Mrs Simpson) and the Duke of Kent, whose official engagement photograph she took with Princess Marina of Greece. These were so popular and impressive that she moved on take the Royal family in 1937 and portraits of the two Princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, engagement photographs for Elizabeth and Philip and then later some delightful portraits of the Queen herself. These last mentioned are probably among Dorothy Wilding's best known photographs; although those of Noel Coward are perhaps more common.
  
  By the time of the Royal photographs in the late 1940s and early 1950s she had moved to America to open a studio and she regularly crossed the Atlantic to spread herself between the two locations. The stars continued to appear before her lens, Yehudi Menuhin, Tyrone Power, Somerset Maugham, Yul Brynner, Claire Bloom, Harry Belafonte and a whole host of others sat for their portraits.
  
  In 1957 she exhibited her work for the final time and in 1958 she retired as a portraitist, finally selling her business to 24-year-old Tom Hustler, then her new young assistant, for £3,000. One of her final public appearances was in 1959 when she made a television appearance with Anthony Armstrong-Jones, when the pair discussed portraiture and the comparative merits of working in the studio or out of doors.
  
  Her final years were concerned with interior decoration and she died after a long illness in a nursing home on 9 February 1976. She did leave a delightful self-portrait (from 1956) in which she saucily poses alongside a number of photographs of some of her more famous sitters.
  
  Terence Pepper presents a formidable and lengthy word-portrait of the lady and this is accompanied by some superb portraits, one of which is, notably, George Bernard Shaw, just after having a haircut!