EVEN if you’ve never stayed at Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes, France, you’ve likely seen a photograph of it. One photograph in particular, taken in the height of summer in 1976. There’s a swimming pool in the foreground—blasted out of basalt rock—bronzed figures in various states of undress around it and a white, low-slung Art Deco building with rounded corners in the background. To the centre left, there’s a diving board jutting out above a French navy ocean.
The hotel still exists—one of the most famous in the world—as does the diving board. The pool, too, albeit much updated. The photographer is sadly no longer with us. He was known as Slim Aarons. Over the course of a six-decade career, he documented, in his own words, ‘attractive people who were doing attractive things in attractive places’.
Ironically, George ‘Slim’ Aarons, would not have described himself as a jet-set photographer. Born in October 1916, on the east coast of the US, Aarons cut his professional teeth as a photojournalist in the Second World War, shooting for Stars and Stripes and Yank magazines. After the war, echoing many of his colleagues, he looked for work inside the burgeoning television and magazine industries. ‘It was an alumni association of sorts,’ says his daughter, Mary Aarons, who sometimes doubled as her father’s on-set assistant. ‘They depended on each other for referrals and LIFE magazine was huge. He shot a lot for them, which took him to Hollywood and Broadway, shooting celebrities and then that led to more.’
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Denne historien er fra June 28, 2023-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
