In 1754 Augusta, Princess of Wales, the mother of George III, commissioned a pair of portraits of herself and her late husband, and a series of portraits of herself and her nine children, from Jean-Etienne Liotard. Both sequences were to be in pastel; the portraits of the parents (including this one) were on paper, those of the children were on vellum, and were slightly smaller in scale. In 1751 - the year of the death of Frederick, Prince of Wales (eldest son of George II) - George Knapton had completed a large family group portrait of the Princess’s family. Liotard’s work for the Princess was thus part of a sequence of portrait commissions placed by George III’s parents. Liotard, a portrait painter who specialised in pastels and miniatures, was a well-established and cosmopolitan figure by the time of Augusta’s commission. He was born in Geneva and worked in Paris, Italy, Constantinople and Vienna. In the 1740s he had been commissioned to produce portraits of the Empress Maria-Theresa in Vienna, and then in 1749, having been introduced at the French court, portraits of Louis XV and his five daughters. The pastel portrait was extremely popular in the eighteenth century. Although it lacked the grandeur of oil painting, pastel was able to capture subtle tonal qualities; none the less it took an artist of Liotard’s stature to produce the illusion of living flesh. This portrait is surprisingly direct - Liotard was known for his pared-down treatment and monochrome backgrounds which owed little to contemporary fashionable portraiture. It has a particular liveliness, as though the sitter had slipped out of a conventional, passive pose in order to make a remark. The resulting portrait gives a beguiling insight into her bearing and expression which more formal portraits rarely capture. The portrait hung as an overdoor in the King’s Bed Chamber at Buckingham House. After Horace Walpole’s visit in the early 1780s he commented on this portrait: ‘extremely like, but the body very flat’. Catalogue entry adapted from George III & Queen Charlotte: Patronage, Collecting and Court Taste, London, 2004