Winterhalter was born in the Black Forest where he was encouraged to draw at school. In 1818 he went to Freiburg to study under Karl Ludwig Schüler and then moved to Munich in 1823, where he attended the Academy and studied under Josef Stieler, a fashionable portrait painter. Winterhalter was first brought to the attention of Queen Victoria by the Queen of the Belgians sending this particular portrait; he subsequently painted numerous portraits at the English court from 1842 till his death.

Queen Louise was the eldest daughter of King Louis-Philippe, the last king to rule France. She married Leopold I, King of the Belgians and Victoria's uncle, in 1832. Queen Victoria wrote in her Journal that Louise was 'so kind & so good; the more one sees her the more one must love her; she is so thoroughly unselfish, – indeed she never thinks of herself' and 'the dearest friend, after my beloved Albert, I have'. Leopold, her elder son, succeeded his father as King of the Belgians in 1865. His father described him in 1864 as 'more selfish and fantastical than ever'. He had an unhappy marriage and his only son died in 1869. His dissolute private life caused estrangement between him and his English relatives. Leopold was founder and sole owner of the Congo Free State (present day Democratic Republic of the Congo), which he exploited as an immense rubber plantation, harvested by enslaved people controlled with a barbarity which shocked even at the time (and was eventually exposed in the Casement Report of 1905). 

Queen Louise wrote to Queen Victoria in November 1838 that she had a copy of the original painting which she hoped would be ready to send to Victoria for Christmas. She remarked that her son's likeness had been very successfully caught, 'His hair … only turned darker since the picture was made.' On Christmas Eve 1838 Queen Victoria wrote in her Journal: 'I went to look at the picture of herself and little Leopold which Louise has been so kind as to send me; and which is quite lovely, so like her, and beautifully painted (in oils) by a German painter called Winterhalter'.

Signed and dated: fr. Winterhalter. Paris 1838. Inscribed on the back with the names of artist and sitters and the date …in 1838. / Copy.