In March 1995, I entered the Royal Society of Portrait Painters annual exhibition with a portrait of the Right Revd Michael Adie CBE, Bishop of Guildford. A new prize had been created that year to be awarded to the best portrait in the show. Unusually, the reward was in the form of a commission to paint someone in public life. The identity of the sitter was a secret. The evening before the opening, I was informed, to my astonishment, that I had won and the sitter would be Her Majesty the Queen.
I had to wait nearly six months before my first sitting. During that time there was very little I could do to prepare apart from think about how it might go. It wasn’t until I had a meeting with the Queen’s dresser at Buckingham Palace, while the Queen was still at Balmoral, that I could really begin to form an idea of what I was going to do in relation to my depiction and interpretation of my subject. The dresser helped me look through the Queen’s wardrobe for a possible outfit. I viewed a book in the Palace which shows every portrait that’s been painted of her during her reign, from the early portrait by Pietro Annigoni, right up to the then present day. Seeing these portraits all together helped me to select an outfit which would be sufficiently different to what had gone before. I decided on a pairing of the Boat Cloak and a yellow dress. The Queen decided on the jewellery.
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Published on From Spectator Life, by Antony Williams
