A watercolour depicting the Duchesse de Nemours in the costume she wore for the ball held at Buckingham Palace on 6 June 1845. Signed and dated to right: Eugène Lami / 1845. 

The Duc and Duchesse de Nemours were the guests of honour at the second Bal Costumé at Buckingham Palace thrown by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, where the guests dressed in the fashions of 1745. Louis d'Orleans, Duc de Nemours, was the second son of Louis-Phillipe, King of the French, and brother of Victoria's beloved aunt Louise, Queen of the Belgians. The duc's wife was Victoria of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and Victoria and Albert's first cousin. See RCIN 913179 for Lami's watercolour of the duc and RCIN 919907 for a watercolour by Louis Haghe depicting the British royal couple dancing a minuet with their guests.

Lami enjoyed a great deal of royal patronage from both the French and British courts; Victoria and Albert were probably first introduced to his work thanks to an album of watercolours by leading French artists (which included seven by Lami) which Louis-Phillipe gave to them in 1844 as a souvenir of their first visit to France the previous year. Lami did design historical ball costumes - see RCIN 919903 for his drawing for the dress that Queen Victoria wore to her third costume ball in 1851 - and this drawing and RCIN 913179 were probably made for this purpose rather than being watercolour portraits painted after the event. Lami made two watercolours each of the duc and duchesse in their costumes; Louis-Philippe paid 1200 francs for the four, and sent Queen Victoria two of them. Victoria then commissioned the artist Edwin Dalton (see RCINs 913162 and 913163) to make smaller-scale copies of them to mount in her series of albums containing watercolour portraits of her friends and family.