This miniature shows Sophia, Electress of Hanover, wearing an embroidered blue dress and red ermine-lined cloak and wearing a black veil which suggests that she is in mourning for her husband, Ernest Augustus, Elector of Hanover, who died in 1698. The use of vellum with a gessoed back as a support for this miniature suggests that is it is a contemporary miniature, produced in the last years of the seventeenth century, rather than a later eighteenth-century copy.

Sophia, Electress of Hanover, was the youngest daughter of Frederick V and Elizabeth of Bohemia, youngest daughter of James I of England. She married, in 1658, Ernest Augustus, later Elector of Hanover. According to the terms of the Act of Succession of 1701, she and her heirs, as Protestants, became successors to the British Crown in the event that Queen Anne should die without heirs. As a result, the Electress's eldest son became George I, King of England on the death of Queen Anne in 1714.