Kneller was born in Lubeck, studied with Rembrandt in Amsterdam and by 1676 was working in England as a fashionable portrait painter. He painted seven British monarchs (Charles II, James II, William III, Mary II, Anne, George I and George II), though his portraits of Charles II are no longer in the collection, and in 1715 was the first artist to be made a Baronet (the next was John Everett Millais in 1885). A set of portraits of naval heroes was given by George IV to the Royal Naval Hospital in Greenwich in 1824.

This portrait forms part of a series of full-length portraits painted for Mary II, probably in emulation of Lely's Windsor Beauties. This series is known as the Hampton Court Beauties as the portraits were originally hung in the Water Gallery there. The group of women Kneller painted were described by Defoe...as 'principal Ladies attending upon her Majesty, or ...[ladies] frequently in her Retinue'. According to Horace Walpole Mary II was advised by Lady Dorchester against the idea of having the most beautiful of her court painted: 'Madam, if the King were to ask for the portraits of all the wits in his court, would not the rest think he called them fools?'

Diana de Vere was the daughter and sole heiress of the 20th and last Earl of Oxford. In 1694 she married Charles Beauclerk, 1st Duke of St Albans. She was First Lady of the Bedchamber and Groom of the Stole to Caroline of Ansbach when Princess of Wales. She is here shown wearing a red dress with a yellow robe, holding in her left hand an orange which she has plucked from an orange tree in a terracotta vase.

This painting and one other are narrower than the other six portraits and were presumably painted to fill two narrower spaces in the Water Gallery.

Signed: G.K. fecit (made it)