This painting is a copy after a portrait of Princess Feodora (RCIN 404691) by prominent nineteenth-century royal portraitist Franz Xaver Winterhalter. The original is signed and dated 1855 and this copy by William Corden the Younger was commissioned by Queen Victoria as a present to her mother the Duchess of Kent in the same year.

Princess Feodora was Queen Victoria’s half-sister from their mother’s first marriage to Emich Carl, 2nd Prince of Leiningen. She and her brother Charles were taken to London following their mother’s second marriage to Edward, Duke of Kent in 1818. In 1828, she married Ernest I, Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg and returned with him to Germany where she resided until her death in 1872. Despite the separation, Princess Feodora and Queen Victoria were devoted to each other. They maintained a lifelong correspondence and the Hohenlohes were granted an allowance of £300 on the occasion of their visits to England. Following Princess Feodora's death, her letters were privately printed for Queen Victoria.

This head and shoulders portrait shows the Princess in a pale dress with a black lace shawl and veil. She wears four strings of pearls and a bunch of roses at her breast.