Having begun life as a mezzotint engraver, George Dawe was much employed as a painter by Prince Leopold both during his marriage (1816-7) and after; he worked also for the Duke and Duchess of Kent. Like Lawrence he was at Aix-la-Chapelle to paint the crowned heads assembled there for the Congress in 1818. He spent the years 1818-28 working for the Emperor Alexander I in St Petersburg, creating 336 portraits of those responsible for the defeat of Napoleon, housed in a specially-created gallery in the Winter Palace (the equivalent of the Waterloo Chamber). He died soon after his return to England in 1829.

This portrait (or at least this design) is probably the pair to the portrait of the Duke, signed and dated 1818 (RCIN 407177); the Duchess granted sittings during July and August 1818. There are other versions of this design documented and still in existence; this one first recorded in the collection of Queen Victoria who presumably inherited from her mother, has good reason to be considered the one painted from the life. It has a startling polish and brilliancy of finish, characteristic of Dawe's work at this date and quite unlike the more painterly style favoured by other English portrait painters at this date.

One of a set of twelve portraits of the ancestors of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert recorded hanging in Queen Victoria’s Bedroom, Windsor Castle, c. 1847-67. The ensemble consisted of portraits of the seven children of Francis, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld and Countess Augusta Reuss of Ebersdorf and their spouses, framed in identical gadrooned frames. It appears the scheme included copies by William Corden and Herbert Luther Smith commissioned by Queen Victoria and earlier portraits adapted or framed for this ensemble. This picture is recorded hanging with the portrait of her husband in a later photograph of the room (see RCIN 2402854). It appears that it was paired in this hang with a copy after Dawe (RCIN 407688) rather that the originally intended pendant, which remained at Buckingham Palace in the nineteenth-century. 

Born Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, the sitter married Edward, Duke of Kent in 1818. Their only daughter became Queen Victoria.