Having begun life as a mezzotint engraver, George Dawe was much employed as a painter by Prince Leopold both at the time of his marriage (1816) 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 is a portrait of a widow painted between the death of the Emperor her husband on 1 December 1825 and her own death in 16 May 1826. It shows her with a bust of her late husband at Taganorog on the Sea of Azov where the Tzar's last days had been spend and where the couple had been finally reconciled after an unhappy marriage. The grieving widow clutches her heart as she considers the bust of her husband, which looks like a term, or a pagan altar to the god Pan and which seems to be subsumed into the light of the setting sun.

The portrait was originally half length and was expanded, possibly by Dawe, in order to make it a matching companion for the portrait of Alexander I (RCIN 400098). Both portraits were executed for Frances Pitt (née Brompton), the companion of the Empress.

It is difficult to imagine the effect that this image must have had on Queen Victoria when within six months of buying it in July 1861 her own husband died.