A watercolour portrait of Donald Macbeath (b.1831), wearing the uniform of a Sergeant Major in the Atholl Highlanders and carrying a cane, and William (Billy) Duff (b.1810), depicted holding a fishing rod and standing in front of a large dead fish, the River Tay at Dunkeld in the background. 

Donald Macbeath served in the Scots Fusiler Guards during the Crimean War in 1854-6, and on his return to Scotland was appointed Head Deer Stalker by the Duke of Atholl and enlisted in the Atholl Highlanders, later being promoted to Sergeant Major. He was among the party who escorted Queen Victoria and Prince Albert through the Poll Tarff (the meeting of the rivers Tilt and Tarff in Perthshire) in October 1861 (see RCIN 451256 for an illustration of this scene). Billy Duff was an Atholl Highlander and part of Victoria and Albert's guard when they stayed at Blair Castle, a seat of the Duke of Atholl, during their second visit to Scotland in 1844. See RCIN 920774 for a portrait of Billy Duff by Charles Landseer painted at this time.

After painting Queen Victoria's three younger sons in the early 1860s, Kenneth MacLeay, a miniature and watercolour portrait painter, was commissioned to produce further portraits of the Queen's favourite retainers. From this developed a more significant commission, and indeed the most important of the artist's career: a series of portraits of representatives of the more important Highland clans, with a view to publication. This group of portraits of retainers and clansmen was executed during the second half of the 1860s and exhibited by John Mitchell, Old Bond Street, in 1869. They were then reproduced in chromolithograph by Vincent Brooks (London's premier lithographer) as illustrations to the two-volume 'The Highlanders of Scotland' (1870).