Victoria of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was Queen Victoria and Prince Albert's first cousin. She married Louis d'Orleans, Duc de Nemours, the second son of Louis-Phillipe, King of the French, and brother of Victoria's beloved aunt Louise, Queen of the Belgians, in 1840. Queen Victoria developed a close friendship with her cousin, who sat for a sketch of which this watercolour may be a copy while staying at Windsor in September 1839. On 17 September Queen Victoria recorded in her journal that Ross had 'made a copy of the sketch he did of Victoire for me'; this watercolour was perhaps commissioned specifically by her to be mounted in a sequence of family portrait albums that Victoria and Albert compiled together. There is also a closely related miniature of the same sitter dated 1840 in the Royal Collection (RCIN 420921). 

Sir William Ross was a highly successful miniature painter, appointed Miniature Painter to the Queen in December 1837 and knighted in 1842. Queen Victoria particularly admired Ross's ability to catch a likeness, and in addition to miniatures also commissioned many independent watercolours and drawings of her own children and her relations and their offspring. On his death in 1860, Victoria and Albert's eldest daughter Vicky wrote to her mother 'No one will ever paint with such brilliancy and freshness again ... he was such a good kind simple hearted old man ... I shall never forget his funny voice and ways.' (RA Z/9/22/28 January 1860). Later that year Victoria and Albert leant 40 miniatures from their collection by Ross to a retrospective of his work.