Jane Bown’s first visit to the palace was to receive an MBE in 1985 and she found the experience so unsuited to her character – she was notoriously shy and self-effacing – that when she received a CBE a decade later she elected to have it conferred by her local Lord Lieutenant rather than return to Buckingham Palace. Pomp and formality were not really Jane’s thing – she was much happier behind than in front of a lens.
One of Jane Bown’s great advantages was that she rarely knew much, if anything, about her subject – something she could not count on with the Queen. Often, her best pictures were snatched from truly awful situations. Her justifiably famous portrait of Samuel Beckett was captured in 30 seconds in a dark alley in open defiance of the writer who famously hated to be photographed.
