During the autumn of 1863, Wilson and his assistant William Gellie (b.1823) had to cut short a photographic trip to north-western Scotland following a request from Queen Victoria to take portraits of her family at Balmoral. The portraits were described by one contemporary review as a ‘peculiarly happy’ series. Perhaps their relative informality is because the portraits were originally intended to be included in private albums.

The queen arranged for her second daughter, Princess Alice, who was visiting with her husband Prince Louis of Hesse, to be photographed on the lower terrace at Balmoral. In the middle portrait, their eldest daughter Princess Victoria is shown seated on her grandmother’s lap. The final portrait shows the Crown Prince of Prussia with his son Prince Wilhelm, known later as Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.