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.
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