In 1754 Augusta, Princess of Wales, commissioned a pair of portraits of herself and her late husband, Frederick Prince of Wales (eldest son of George II who had died in 1751), 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 were on paper, those of the children were on vellum, and were slightly smaller in scale. 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 of Augusta's fourth son shows the sitter seated at a baize covered card table, upon which he has constructed a house of cards, a traditional symbol of the fragility of earthly hopes. He wears a dark blue jacket with gold braid and a white lace frill.