Henry Richard Graves was he second son of Lord Graves and nephew of the first Marquess of Anglesey. As an artist, he specialised in portraits of fashionable society, exhibiting seventy-one paintings at the Royal Academy between 1846 and 1881. In 1871 this fashionable and aristocratic artist had been commissioned to paint Queen Victoria in a group with Princess Beatrice. It did not meet with the Queen's approval – she wrote 'He cannot draw' – and was eventually destroyed.

In 1874 Graves was keen to please the Queen by painting separate portraits of her and Princess Beatrice, and her final verdict on this portrait was 'very nice picture & good likeness'. A contemporary observed in a letter the difficulties Graves was facing: 'He is painting another picture of The Queen – as the former was disliked. He says it dont pay painting The Queen - & he would rather not. The honor is great but the payment ordinary and the expence of living down here [Osborne] considerable. Beside which he is driven wild with Royal suggestions'. The Queen seems to have found Graves equally challenging, writing in a letter to Princess Louise on the 19 December 1872 that the Princess of Wales had agreed to let Graves go down to Sandringham to paint a head of her for the Queen 'and now he says he cant undertake it as his Doctor wont allow him to leave his Studio at this season.'

Although the Queen recored multiple sittings for this portrait in her journal of April 1874, Graves appears to have based the painting on a photograph taken three years earlier by W & D Downey, with the addition of a book of verse and the diamond and sapphire coronet designed by Prince Albert for the Queen in the year of their marriage. After she emerged from mourning in 1866 to attend the State Opening of Parliament, five years after Albert's death, Queen Victoria wore the coronet atop her widow's cap, as in this portrait.