Lee Miller And Cecil Beaton Album Acquired By Bodleian Libraries

2026-04-09 02:06:23

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Bodleian Libraries acquires wartime scrapbook linking Lee Miller and Cecil Beaton

A thick, annotated scrapbook assembled during World War II has found a permanent home at the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford. Compiled by Roland Haupt between 1943 and 1949, the album contains newspaper clippings and hundreds of photographs by Lee Miller and Cecil Beaton, offering a rare, intimate record of the years when both photographers were working for Vogue.

The acquisition was brokered by dealer Michael Hoppen after Haupt's descendants approached him about nine months before the sale. The price was not disclosed. Rather than send the album into the market, the family chose to keep it intact and in England, a decision that preserved both the object and the layered history embedded in its pages.

Known as a daybook, the scrapbook includes Haupt's inscriptions alongside images that move between celebrity culture and the violence of war. Among the photographs are Lee Miller in Hitler's bathtub, Picasso, the surrender of St. Malo, concentration camp victims, and wartime Germany. The album also reflects Haupt's role developing film for Miller and Beaton, a behind-the-scenes position that places him close to one of the most consequential photographic circles of the period.

Some contact sheets were damaged by the high acid content of the mounting pages, a reminder that archival objects often carry their own material fragility. Even so, the scrapbook's survival gives researchers a concentrated view of how images, captions, clippings, and personal annotations circulated during the war years.

Its arrival at the Bodleian comes as exhibitions on Cecil Beaton and Lee Miller have been on view in London, underscoring the continuing appetite for material that expands the public record around both photographers. For Oxford, the acquisition is not only a preservation story but also a scholarly one: a private working album, once nearly dispersed, now joins an institutional archive where its context can be studied in full.

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