Dorothy Wilding was a noted English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 society photographer from Gloucester

Gloucester

Gloucester is a city, district and county town of Gloucestershire in the South West region of England. Gloucester lies close to the Welsh border, and on the River Severn, approximately north-east of Bristol, and south-southwest of Birmingham....

. She wanted to become an actress or artist

Artist

An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...

 but this career was disallowed by her uncle, in whose family she lived, so she chose the art of photography

Photography

Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...

 which she started to learn from the age of sixteen.

By 1929 she had already moved studio a few times and in her Bond Street

Bond Street

Bond Street is a major shopping street in the West End of London that runs north-south through Mayfair between Oxford Street and Piccadilly. It has been a fashionable shopping street since the 18th century and is currently the home of many high price fashion shops...

, London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

, studio she attracted theatrical stars and shot her first British Royal Family

British Royal Family

The British Royal Family is the group of close relatives of the monarch of the United Kingdom. The term is also commonly applied to the same group of people as the relations of the monarch in her or his role as sovereign of any of the other Commonwealth realms, thus sometimes at variance with...

 portrait of the 17-year-old Prince George (later Duke of Kent

Duke of Kent

Duke of Kent is a title which has been created various times in the peerages of Great Britain and the United Kingdom, most recently as a royal dukedom for the fourth son of George V.-Pre-history:...

). This sitting was eventually followed by the famous Wilding portrait of the new Queen Elizabeth II that was used for a series of definitive postage stamps

Definitive stamp

A definitive stamp is a postage stamp, that is part of a regular issue of a country's stamps available for sale by the postal service for an extended period of time...

 of Great Britain used between 1953 and 1967, and a series of Canadian stamps in use from 1954 to 1962. A previous portrait sitting of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon Queen Consort

Queen consort

A queen consort is the wife of a reigning king. A queen consort usually shares her husband's rank and holds the feminine equivalent of the king's monarchical titles. Historically, queens consort do not share the king regnant's political and military powers. Most queens in history were queens consort...

 of King George VI had turned into a double portrait of the royal couple and was adapted for the 1937 Coronation issue stamp. That portrait led to her being the first woman awarded a Royal Warrant

Royal Warrant

Royal warrants of appointment have been issued for centuries to those who supply goods or services to a royal court or certain royal personages. The warrant enables the supplier to advertise the fact that they supply to the royal family, so lending prestige to the supplier...

 to be the official photographer to a King and Queen at their coronation

Coronation

A coronation is a ceremony marking the formal investiture of a monarch and/or their consort with regal power, usually involving the placement of a crown upon their head and the presentation of other items of regalia...

. She opened a second photo studio in New York

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

 in 1937.

An autobiography In Pursuit of Perfection was published in 1958.

Portraits

Besides members of the Royal family, Dorothy Wilding photographed many famous people like filmstars and celebrities amongst whom were: Noël Coward

Noël Coward

Sir Noël Peirce Coward was an English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and what Time magazine called "a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise".Born in Teddington, a suburb of London, Coward attended a dance academy...

, Jessie Matthews

Jessie Matthews

Jessie Matthews, OBE was an English actress, dancer and singer of the 1930s, whose career continued into the post-war period.-Early life:...

, Wallis Simpson, (Duchess of Windsor)

Wallis, The Duchess of Windsor

Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, previously Wallis Simpson, was an American socialite whose third husband, Prince Edward, Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom and the Dominions, abdicated his throne to marry her.Wallis's father died shortly after her birth, and she and her...

, Diana Wynyard

Diana Wynyard

Diana Wynyard, CBE , whose birth name was Dorothy Isobel Cox, was an English stage and film actress.-Life and career:...

, Claire Bloom

Claire Bloom

Claire Bloom is an English film and stage actress.-Early life:Bloom was born in the North London suburb of Finchley, the daughter of Elizabeth and Edward Max Blume, who worked in sales...

, Harriet Cohen

Harriet Cohen

Harriet Cohen CBE was a British pianist.-Biography:Harriet Cohen was born in London and studied piano at the Royal Academy of Music under Tobias Matthay, having won the Ada Lewis scholarship at the age of 12. She made her debut at a Chappell's Sunday concert at the Queen's Hall a year later...

, Cecil Beaton

Cecil Beaton

Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton, CBE was an English fashion and portrait photographer, diarist, painter, interior designer and an Academy Award-winning stage and costume designer for films and the theatre...

, George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...

, Earl Mountbatten of Burma

Earl Mountbatten of Burma

The title Earl Mountbatten of Burma was created in the Peerage of the United Kingdom in 1947 for Rear Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, 1st Viscount Mountbatten of Burma, the last Viceroy of India....

, Anna May Wong

Anna May Wong

Anna May Wong was an American actress, the first Chinese American movie star, and the first Asian American to become an international star...

, Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley

Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. Best known for his novels including Brave New World and a wide-ranging output of essays, Huxley also edited the magazine Oxford Poetry, and published short stories, poetry, travel...

, Dame Gladys Cooper, Tallulah Bankhead

Tallulah Bankhead

Tallulah Brockman Bankhead was an award-winning American actress of the stage and screen, talk-show host, and bonne vivante...

, Helen Wills Moody

Helen Wills Moody

Helen Newington Wills Roark , also known as Helen Wills Moody, was an American tennis player. She has been described as "the first American born woman to achieve international celebrity as an athlete."-Biography:...

, Raymond Massey

Raymond Massey

Raymond Hart Massey was a Canadian/American actor.-Early life:Massey was born in Toronto, Ontario, the son of Anna , who was born in Illinois, and Chester Daniel Massey, the wealthy owner of the Massey-Ferguson Tractor Company. Massey's family could trace their ancestry back to the American...

, Maurice Chevalier

Maurice Chevalier

Maurice Auguste Chevalier was a French actor, singer, entertainer and a noted Sprechgesang performer. He is perhaps best known for his signature songs, including Louise, Mimi, Valentine, and Thank Heaven for Little Girls and for his films including The Love Parade and The Big Pond...

, Nancy Astor, Diana Wynyard

Diana Wynyard

Diana Wynyard, CBE , whose birth name was Dorothy Isobel Cox, was an English stage and film actress.-Life and career:...

, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

Douglas Elton Fairbanks, Jr. KBE was an American actor and a highly decorated naval officer of World War II.-Early life:...

, Barbara Hutton

Barbara Hutton

Barbara Woolworth Hutton was an American socialite dubbed by the media as the "Poor Little Rich Girl" because of her troubled life...

, Fannie Hurst

Fannie Hurst

Fannie Hurst was an American novelist. Although her books are not well remembered today, during her lifetime some of her more famous novels were Stardust , Lummox , A President is Born , Back Street , and Imitation of Life...

, Dame Barbara Cartland, Ralph Hancock

Ralph Hancock

Ralph Hancock was a Welsh landscape gardener and author. Hancock built gardens in the UK in the 1920s, 30s and 40s and in the United States in the 1930s...

, Dame Daphne du Maurier, Sir John Gielgud, Sir Norman Hartnell, Harry Belafonte

Harry Belafonte

Harold George "Harry" Belafonte, Jr. is an American singer, songwriter, actor and social activist. He was dubbed the "King of Calypso" for popularizing the Caribbean musical style with an international audience in the 1950s...

, Louis Jourdan, Yehudi Menuhin

Yehudi Menuhin

Yehudi Menuhin, Baron Menuhin, OM, KBE was a Russian Jewish American violinist and conductor who spent most of his performing career in the United Kingdom. He was born to Russian Jewish parents in the United States, but became a citizen of Switzerland in 1970, and of the United Kingdom in 1985...

, William Somerset Maugham and Yul Brynner

Yul Brynner

Yul Brynner was a Russian-born actor of stage and film. He was best known for his portrayal of Mongkut, king of Siam, in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Actor for the film version; he also played the role more than 4,500 times on...

.

She is also known for her pictorial style nude photographs.

See also

• Country definitive stamps
  Country definitives
  Country definitives, formerly known as regional postage stamps of Great Britain are the postage stamps issued for regions of the United Kingdom, reflecting the regional identity of the various countries and islands of the British isles....
  
  
• Wilding series stamps
  Wilding series
  The Wildings were a series of definitive postage stamps featuring the Dorothy Wilding photographic portrait of Queen Elizabeth II that were in use between 1952 and 1967 until they were replaced by the Machin series.- History :...
  
  

External links

• Life of Dorothy Wilding (archived version of Stamp Magazine article)
• The Royal Collection