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 were on paper, those of the children (including this portrait) 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, and an artist of Liotard’s skill could exploit the capacity of this powdery medium to express the bloom of flesh.

This portrait of the 16-year-old Prince of Wales is surprisingly direct - Liotard was known for his pared-down treatment and monochrome backgrounds which owed little to contemporary fashionable portraiture.

However, the exposure to light it has sustained over 250 years of continuously hanging, either in London or at Windsor, has caused fading of the fugitive pigment which Liotard used for the Prince’s coat, which would have been a bright red. In contrast the pigments used for the blue of the Garter sash, and for the face, remain strong.

Catalogue entry adapted from George III & Queen Charlotte: Patronage, Collecting and Court Taste, London, 2004