She has photographed Whoopi Goldberg in a bath of milk, Clint Eastwood bound with ropes and the actress Roseanne Barr mud wrestling, but when America’s leading celebrity photographer arrived at Buckingham Palace, Her Majesty probably had something more traditional in mind.

Annie Leibovitz, who made her name with outlandish photographs of America’s most famous people, had been commissioned to take an official portrait to mark the Queen’s forthcoming state visit to the US.

The photographer drew up at the Palace with her retinue on March 28 and was shown into the White Drawing Room.

Leibovitz’s shoots are noted for their extravagance: typically she commands vast budgets and fleets of panicking assistants. She has been known to charge more than $100,000 (£50,000) a day.

Fortunately, Her Majesty is not short of extravagant outfits for just such occasions, and the renowned photographer had waived her fee. Leibovitz indicated beforehand the sort of ensemble that the Queen ought to wear, and Her Majesty had dressed accordingly in a pale gold embroidered evening dress by Stuart Parvin.

Her shoulders were wrapped in a stole of white fur. Above the gown hung the diamond necklace she was presented with by the Nizam of Hydera-bad in 1947 and, on her head, the tiara of Queen Mary.

Her Majesty must have been sensible of the punishing demands that the celebrated photographer regularly makes of the most high-profile of her clients.

Kate Winslet was repeatedly dunked in a tank of water for her portrait while a heavily pregnant Demi Moore was required to pose naked. Sylvester Stallone was also obliged to go nude and adopt the pose of Rodin’s Thinker.

The Queen must have been relieved then, that for this particular shoot, Leibovitz wanted her to sit in a chair and stare out of the window on to the gardens of Buckingham Palace.

The Palace said yesterday that Leibovitz had been free to arrange the shoot as she wished. Before she arrived, the photographer said she intended to take inspiration from Cecil Beaton.

“I like tradition,” she said at a reception for Americans at the London royal residence. “Cecil Beaton’s pictures – they’re very important to me. I feel like it’s a documentation and I want to take a very simple portrait.”

However Leibovitz remained tight lipped about her encounter with the Queen. “This was an official commission so she won’t talk about it,” her agent said.

The photographer, originally from Connecticut, began her steady rise to prominence when, at 19, she took a photograph of the poet Allen Ginsberg smoking cannabis on an antiVietnam march. Rolling Stone published it on its cover and by 24 she was the magazine’s chief photographer.

Buckingham Palace must have seemed a long way from the stages upon which America’s most powerful parade for her lens, but as the Queen travels tomorrow to Virginia, for the 400th anniversary of the US’s first permanent settlers, further portraits of her will be displayed in Vanity Fair, where Leibovitz’s more recent work has been seen.

A celebrity in her own right

— Born in Connecticut, she studied photography at the San Francisco Art Institute

— Aged 25 she was on Richard Nixon’s helicopter as as he fled the White House

— Her 1980 photograph of John Lennon, naked, hugging Yoko Ono, was taken hours before his assassination

— In 1981 she persuaded the artist Christo to be photographed wrapped in fabric, as in one of his artworks

— In 1993 leaves the celebrity circuit for Sarajevo, and photographs a baby being born without anaesthetic during a seige For Disney, she put David Beckham on a horse as a knight in shining armour. Beyoncé Knowles was Alice in Wonderland and Scarlet Johansson was Cinderella

Source: Times database

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