Black-and-white photograph of Queen Elizabeth II standing in her admiral's cloak, head tilted to the left.

Cecil Beaton took this stark, simple and direct image of The Queen for use in his first major retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery in London. He hoped that the final section of the exhibition would be the highlight and therefore wanted to ‘try something different’ when photographing Queen Elizabeth II. 

For this portrait, Beaton has taken inspiration from Pietro Annigoni’s celebrated portrait of the monarch painted for the Fishmongers' Company in 1955. Beaton replaced the velvet mantle of the Order of the Garter with a woollen Admiral’s boat cloak, stripping out the landscape and romanticism of Annigoni’s image. Beaton himself described his portrait as ‘the poor man’s Annigoni’, partly playing on the general perception that photography was seen as inferior to painting at the time, yet achieving a timeless portrait of the monarch as figurehead.