Princess Louisa, the youngest child of George II and Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach, was born on 7 December 1724 at Leicester House, London. Her mother, Queen Caroline, died in 1737 so, from the age of 13, Louisa was brought up by her elder sister, Princess Caroline Elizabeth. On 14 September 1743, a treaty was signed between Great Britain and Denmark agreeing that Louisa should marry Prince Frederick (1723–66), son of Christian VI, King of Denmark and Norway, and Sophie Magdalene of Brandenburg-Culmbach. A month later, on 19 October 1743, Louisa left London for Hanover. She was married there by proxy on 10 November 1743, with her brother, William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, representing Prince Frederick. She married Frederick in person at Christiansborg Castle, Copenhagen, on 11 December 1743, and they had five children. Frederick became King of Denmark and Norway on the death of his father on 6 August 1746. Louisa died at Christiansborg Castle on 19 December 1751, and was buried at Roskilde Cathedral.

Bernard Lens was the son of an engraver and the grandson of an enameller, and is likely to have trained at the drawing school established by his father in St Paul's Churchyard, London, in 1697, the first commercial establishment of its kind. As drawing master to Princess Mary, Princess Louisa and William, Duke of Cumberland, Lens would have had the opportunity to paint their portraits from life. He would also have had access to the historic miniatures in the Royal Collection which had, by the mid-1730s, been assembled in Queen Caroline's Closet at Kensington Palace. In producing this miniature of Princess Louisa, Lens adopted a deliberately anachronistic approach, reverting to the blue background which was characteristic of the work of Nicholas Hilliard (1547–1619) and the early work of Isaac Oliver (d. 1617) at the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts. He may have been influenced specifically by Isaac Oliver's miniature of Princess Elizabeth, later Queen of Bohemia (RCIN 420031), which shows the sitter at the slightly younger age of fourteen, and shares with the present piece a delicacy of handling which is most evident in the flowers worn in the subjects' hair.

Miniatures were often set in lockets, as this one is, so that they could be hung from a chain or ribbon and worn round the neck.

Signed and dated above the right shoulder in gold paint: BL 1739 (monogram) and inscribed in pencil on a piece of paper fixed to the backing card: B.Lens Fecit / ad vivum 1739. The original locket back is preserved with the miniature, engraved in relief with a crown and the Princess's monogram LL.

Text adapted from The First Georgians: Art and Monarchy 1714-1760, London, 2014.