The Queen is telling the little Princess Royal not to wake her brother who is sleeping on the Queen’s lap. There are several preparatory drawings for the painting in the Royal Collection, and the composition recalls Francis Cotes’s portrait of Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III and Victoria’s grandmother, with the sleeping Princess Royal, which was at Windsor at the time this portrait was painted. The picture was painted to be framed as a roundel. It is inscribed with the word Sketch in Landseer’s hand on one of the unpainted spandrels (space between the roundel and the frame) and a scale is marked on the edge of the canvas on all four sides.