After Sir Godfrey Kneller's (1646 – 1723) double portrait painted before mid-1694 showing William, Duke of Gloucester, with his mother, Queen Anne, when Princess of Denmark. The portrait is known from a copy in the NPG, London (no. 325), and another at Althorp, Northamptonshire. William, Duke of Gloucester, the son of Queen Anne and Prince George of Denmark, was the only one of their eighteen children to survive infancy. His early death from smallpox on 30 July 1700, soon after his eleventh birthday, resulted in the Hanoverian monarch George I succeeding to the British throne.

Joseph Lee (1780-1859) was self-taught as an an enamellist at a late age, but made a successful career as an enamel painter, exhibiting intermittently at the RA and the SBA between 1809 and 1853 from addresses in London. He styled himself as 'enamel painter' to Princess Charlotte of Wales and later worked as 'enamel painter' to Augustus, Duke of Sussex. It may have been the gift of a small enamel of the Duke of Sussex to Queen Victoria that first made her familiar with Lee's work. She employed his services for producing enamel copies based on oil paintings between 1844 and 1850. He retired from miniature painting in his final years and died, aged seventy-nine, in Gravesend, Kent, on 26 December 1859.