Wissing was a Dutch artist who came to London in 1676, studied with Sir Peter Lely and effectively took over the business for the seven years between Lely’s death in 1680 and his own in 1687 (aged only thirty one). All the works by Wissing in the Royal Collection date for this period.

This work is the full length by Wissing of the Duke of Cambridge over the door in the Queen's Drawing Room of the Garden House at Windsor recorded in the inventory of Queen Anne. It must be a posthumous work - the sitter died before Wissing's arrival in England. The face is based on Wright’s portrait (OM 287, 404330), though Wissing has cunningly cast the figure in a sort of Arcadian paradise of perpetual childhood.

A date for its execution is suggested by the following correspondence: when Wissing was in Holland in 1685 to paint Mary II (then Princess of Orange), she wrote to Lady Bathurst (letter of 14 July 1687), 'I had orderd Mr. Wissing when he was heer to make me a copy of ye princes picture onely a head . . . but . . I have changed my mind as for my mothers and brothers picturs haveing writt for them to the King'. It is not entirely clear what this means or what outcome might be expected, but ‘brother’ here must refer to James and it seems reasonably to connect this discussion with this portrait. A date of 1685-7 would then fit the story.

The sitter is shown as a child (the age he was when he died), dressed as a shepherd boy, holding a crook over his shoulder and pointing towards a stag being pursued by hounds in the distance, with a dog running beside him.

The painting appears in Pyne's illustrated 'Royal Residences' of 1819, hanging in Queen Caroline's Drawing Room at Kensington Palace (RCIN 922151).