An extract from Prince Albert's diary reveals that he sat for this miniature on 6 May 1844 (RA VIC/Y 204/64). Queen Victoria was overjoyed when he presented it to her for her birthday on 24 May, but it was evidently not a surprise, and indeed the Queen seems to have been instrumental in dictating the form that the portrait should take: 'My 25th birthday … [Prince Albert] has again loaded me with such beautiful things, amongst them, his miniature, a large one, painted by Thorburn, – a "chef d'oeuvre", & so like. My beloved Albert is painted in armour, which I so much wished, – with a very dark blue background. I cannot say how beautiful it is, nor how it exactly portrays the dear original' (RA QVJ: 24 May 1844). She also expressed her delight in a letter to her half-sister Princess Feodora, describing her gift as 'a most beautiful large miniature of himself by a new artist called Thorburn, – so like and so beautiful' (RA VIC/ADDU/171/157). It remained one of the Queen's favourite images of her consort and many years later she was to tell Sir Theodore Martin that it: 'gives more His real expression than any thing she knows. During the fatal illness & in the last hours of His life He was wonderfully like this Picture' (RA VIC/Y 169/69, 20 December 1873).

Thorburn's knightly analogy conjures one of the most romantic and striking portraits of Prince Albert. Although the choice of theme was the Queen's, the manner of treatment and its intensity were Thorburn's own, produced within the context of the revival of interest in medievalism at the time. By executing his masterpiece with such aplomb, and within the prevailing taste for medieval romanticism, Thorburn made a significant contribution to the idealisation of the image of the Prince, particularly after his premature death. This was to reach its apogee with the dedication of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem The Idylls of the King to Prince Albert in 1862.