This portrait of Prince Octavius forms part of the series of fifteen portraits probably commissioned by Queen Charlotte of the royal family. They were painted at Windsor in September and October 1782. On 30 October the Morning Herald reported that Gainsborough ‘has just completed his painting of the whole Royal Family, at Windsor... all of which are spoken of as highly-finished characteristic portraits of the illustrious personages who sat to him’. All the portraits were exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1783 (134); the sight of this one, showing her recendly deceased son, is said to have reduced Queen Charlotte to tears.

The hanging of the whole sequence of portraits at the Royal Academy in 1783 concerned Gainsborough considerably. On the eve of the exhibition he sent a letter to the Hanging Committee insisting that the portraits should not be hung ‘above the line along with full-lengths’ and said if this happened ‘he never more, whilst he breathes, will send another Picture to the Exhibition’.

Queen Charlotte hung the portraits in her apartments in Buckingham House, but by 1838 they had been moved to Windsor. At the exhibition of the King’s Pictures at the Royal Academy in 1946, they were arranged according to Gainsborough’s original design. After the exhibition they were similarly displayed in the Grand Corridor at Windsor in frames of an eighteenth-century design.

The painting appears in Pyne's illustrated 'Royal Residences' of 1819, hanging in the Queen's Breakfast Room at Buckingham Palace (RCIN 922145).