A half-length watercolour copy from a full-length portrait of Prince Albert by Franz Xaver Winterhalter (RCIN 404387).

The portrait that this watercolour derives from was painted by Winterhalter, Victoria and Albert's favourite portraitist, in 1843. It shows the Prince wears the robes of the Order of the Garter and the collars of the Order of the Garter, the Bath and the Golden Fleece. He holds a Field-Marshal's baton, which is still in the Royal Collection, in his left hand. Queen Victoria recorded in her journal on 30 September 1843 that she and Prince Albert ‘looked at Winterhalter’s full length portraits of us both, which are now quite finished & really splendid, both as to painting & likeness’, and in 1899 she remarked that it was ‘the portrait she liked best’. Many copies were made of the painting, life-size, in miniature and on china, to hang in British Embassies, and to give as presents. This watercolour copy, and a similar one of the companion portrait of the Queen (RCIN 913323), were commissioned by Victoria to put in the series of albums containing watercolour portraits of family and friends that she and Albert compiled together.

Edwin Dalton was a miniature painter and copyist who enjoyed Victoria and Albert's patronage in the 1840s making copies after works in their collection by other artists. Dalton's wife Magdalena Ross was similarly employed by the royal couple, and Magdalena's brother William - later Sir William Ross - was one of the Queen and Prince's favourite portrait painters. Between 24 January and 6 February 1846 Edwin Dalton supervised the attempts of Victoria and Albert to learn the printmaking technique of lithography; see RCINs 2506499 and 2506496, prints depicting some of the royal children, for examples where Queen Victoria drew the images on the lithographic stone and Dalton then printed them. Dalton travelled to Australia in the 1850s, where he lived in first Melbourne and then Sydney, and practiced as an artist and photographer.