Beechey began this portrait at Kensington Palace on 28 May 1821; it was finished the following year. The 1823 engraving by William Skelton says that the painting was in the possession of Prince Leopold, which suggests that it was he who commissioned this record of his sister and niece. The two year old Princess holds a miniature of her recently deceased father, the Duke of Kent, which she has taken from the case lying next to her on the settee and which she rests on her mother’s shoulder, making an affecting triangle of heads. The Duchess is still dressed in mourning. Beechey’s early work follows the tradition of Reynolds, with techniques and ideas borrowed from Romney and Gainsborough. The composition here recalls Reynolds’s famous 1759-61 portrait of the Countess Spencer with her daughter at Althorp, particularly in the way in which the child looks shyly at the viewer. However the precise painting technique here and the attention to the details of embroidering show Beechey turning away from the eighteenth-century classics and looking at has contemporaries, George Dawe and Thomas Lawrence.