Glittering cast of 1920s and 30s bohemians will be subject of National Portrait Gallery show

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

The wild and hedonistic world of the Bright Young Things is to be explored in an exhibition bringing together photographs by Cecil Beaton.

The National Portrait Gallery on Monday announced details of a show next year that will tell the stories of a dazzling cast of often beautiful and extravagant bohemians who partied their way through the 1920s and 30s.

The show’s curator, Robin Muir, said he hoped to “bring to life a deliriously eccentric, glamorous and creative era” of British cultural life, one that combined “high society and the avant garde, artists and writers, socialites and partygoers, all set against the rhythms of the jazz age”.

About 150 works will go on show, some of which have rarely been exhibited.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The artist Oliver Messel posing for Beaton. Photograph: Cecil Beaton/Sotheby’s/PA

Many of the sitters have fabulous costumes and equally fabulous names. They include Beaton’s friend Mary Liliane Matilda, Baroness d’Erlanger, who was known as Baba and became Princess Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge after marrying a French aristrocat descended from Louis IX.

She was a close friend of Paula Gellibrand, who became the Marquesa de Casa Maury and was Beaton’s favourite model. The two women were so close they were known as the Twins.

There will be portraits of prominent socialites such as Edwina Mountbatten and Diana Mitford, the Mitford sister who went on to marry the British fascist Oswald Mosley. The ceremony took place at the home of Joseph Goebbels with Adolf Hitler as a guest of honour.

Other sitters include the sulky and eccentric Stephen Tennant, the brightest of the Bright Young Things, who had a four-year affair with the poet Siegfried Sassoon and whose aim in life was to do as little as possible. He helped inspire the fictional characters Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and Cedric Hampton in Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate.

There will also be portraits of the artist Rex Whistler, the composer William Walton, the stage designer Oliver Messel, the poet Iris Tree and the Anglophile actors Tallulah Bankhead and Anna May Wong.

Beaton’s own life and relationship with the circle will also be explored, showing his transformation from middle-class suburban schoolboy to glittering society figure and Vogue magazine mainstay.

• Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things will be at the National Portrait Gallery from 12 March to 7 June 2020.