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 and subsequently painted numerous portraits at the English court from 1842 till his death.

In 1858 Princess Victoria, Queen Victoria's eldest daughter, had married Prince Frederick William of Prussia. This is a portrait of them and their two eldest children. The Crown Prince is wearing a Lieutenant-General's uniform with the ribbon and star of the Garter and the collar of the Hohenzollern House Order. The Crown Princess has her daughter, Charlotte, on her lap, and Prince William stands beside his mother. In March 1861 the Crown Princess wrote to her mother about the difficulties of getting children to have their portrait painted: 'It is very difficult to make William sit still, Baby is much better she plays with her toes and talks to them the whole time…You should have seen the state of despair Winterhalter was in when he heard he was to paint a group – he said he could not, it was too difficult he disliked painting groups &c…but now he seems to take great pleasure in his picture and thinks it will succeed very well'. Queen Victoria had sent her daughter the exact measurements for the size of the painting, along with a sketch from Prince Albert 'giving a sort of Notion of what it should be'. She also commented that 'Papa won't have regular Portraits here, but fine Pictures – containing Portraits'. Prince Albert never saw the painting – he died on 14 December 1861.

Signed and dated: Fr Winterhalter / 1862.