Ernest I, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (1784-1844), was the eldest son of Franz, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, whom he succeeded in 1806. He succeeded to the Duchy of Gotha in 1826, after his brother-in-law’s death, through his marriage to Louise Saxe-Gotha. They separated in 1824 and divorced in 1826. In 1832 he married Mary of Württemberg. He was Prince Albert’s father and Queen Victoria’s uncle. Albert and Victoria were extremely fond of him. On his death in 1844, the queen wrote of ‘our present overwhelming grief … our Dearly beloved Father, was the kindest & best of Parents, - of Relations & of Princes’. Princess Feodora, Queen Victoria’s half-sister, remembered ‘how happy he always was to show his favourite places and the improvements and alterations he had made; he has left many monuments of his excellent tastes & talents’.

Here Ernest is wearing Imperial Russian uniform, the ribbon of the Rue Crown (Saxony), an Iron Cross, the crosses of St Anne and St Alexander Nevski (Russia), St Henry (Saxony), the Black Eagle (Prussia) and another which is obscured.

This portrait depicts the duke on his wedding day in 1817 and was copied from a miniature by Ruprecht known from a small stipple engraving by Bolt (RCIN 610076) and from a variant in oil by H.L. Smith in the Royal Collection (RCIN 407125). It is a companion portrait to a miniature of his wife, Louisa, on their wedding day (RCIN 420587).

Adolf or Johann Ruprecht was a German miniaturist active in the early part of the nineteenth century.