Before his appointment as Queen Victoria’s ‘Painter of History and Portrait’ in 1837, George Hayter had impressed the young Princess with his skill as a portraitist and helped her with her first attempts at oil painting. Hayter was to succeed Sir David Wilkie as Principal Painter in Ordinary to the Queen in 1841. However, he received no royal commissions after 1842 as the Queen came to prefer the work, and personality, of other artists - particularly Sir Edwin Landseer and Franz Xaver Winterhalter. Queen Victoria commissioned this, her State Portrait, from Hayter in 1838. The 19 year-old Queen is depicted as she was at her Coronation in Westminster Abbey on 28 June of that year. Shown seated in her Homage Chair, she wears Coronation Robes and the Imperial State Crown and carries the Sceptre with the Cross. Hayter’s first background for the painting showed the Queen in Westminster Abbey, but he was to alter this later, placing her in a more generic regal setting. Queen Victoria’s pose, with her upturned face illuminated by a shaft of light, endows the composition with a religious spirit reminiscent of Baroque painting. In fact the day did not proceed smoothly, as the Queen was to relate in her journal. For instance, the Coronation Ring, which had been made to fit her little finger, was forced on to her fourth finger by the Archbishop and the unfortunate Queen had to bathe her hand in iced water after the ceremony before she could remove the ring. There was, according to Lord St John, the Sub-Dean, ‘a continual difficulty and embarrassment, and the Queen never knew what she was to do’. Nevertheless, she described the day as ‘the proudest of my life’.