Jean at Nineteen (artist: †Seán Manchester)

In 1962, nineteen-year-old Jean Shrimpton almost didn’t board a flight from the newly built Heathrow airport to New York. Unlike today’s models, who travel non-stop for their work, Jean had never been on an aeroplane, despite graduating from Lucie Clayton’s modelling school eighteen months prior.

The Beatles were unknown. There was no such thing as youth culture. No one had heard of Bailey either. Dressed in matching black leather, both were standing on the threshold of fame. This was before Jean became The Shrimp. She had been raised on a farm with dogs, horses and elocution lessons, and was far less confident about her place in the (about to be upturned) British class system.

After their New York shoot was published, Bailey and The Shrimp became superstars – reluctantly in her case. As she wrote: “I’m not interested in clothes and I hate people staring at me.” That didn’t prevent her, though, from modelling for more than a decade, during which she worked with all the greats, including Richard Avedon. By the late 1960s, she had earned enough money to pay £13,000 in cash for a mews house in Knightsbridge – and dated two of the era’s leading heart throbs. She left David Bailey for Terence Stamp, then left him too, rejected Warren Beatty, escaped to deepest Wales where she took up photography (her subjects seemed to have mainly consisted of dead sheep; it wasn’t a money spinner) and lived with the poet Heathcote Williams. She eventually settled with her handsome husband Michael Cox in relative obscurity in Penzance, where they run a hotel. 

To this day, she dodges photographers. I have painted portraits of The Shrimp in oils in the past, and now sought to capture the nineteen-year-old Jean, on the brink of the celebrity she would eschew.