A watercolour showing the two Princes, who wear Tyrolean costume, in a mountainous landscape, with attendants, one named Conrad, carrying dead chamois to the right. Signed and dated: Carl Haag 1852. The verso is inscribed in a later hand, probably copying an inscription by the artist: His Royal Highness the Duke of Saxe-Coburg & Gotha and His Serene Highness the Prince of Leiningen returning from a Chamois Hunt in the Valley of the Inner Riss. Tyrol. By Carl Haag.

Carl Haag was born in Bavaria and visited London in 1847 to learn more about English watercolour painting technique, studying at the Royal Academy Schools the following year and settling in England. On a sketching trip in the Tyrol in 1852 he had a chance encounter with Charles, Prince of Leiningen (Queen Victoria’s half-brother) and Ernest II, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (Prince Albert’s brother), who jointly commissioned Haag to paint this watercolour of them in an Alpine setting as a Christmas present for Queen Victoria. Victoria and Albert, impressed with the double portrait, then invited the artist to their residence in the Scottish Highlands, Balmoral Castle, the following autumn, to paint scenes of their lives there. His association with the British court endured for a time after Albert's death in 1861, and there is a significant corpus of watercolours by him in the Royal Collection (including several Egyptian subjects, as Haag spent two years in Egypt and the Near East in 1858-60 and travelled again to Egypt 1873-4).

This watercolour was exhibited at the Old Watercolour Society (of which Haag was a member) exhibition in 1853 (no. 172).