This portrait of King Charles was painted at Birkhall, on the Balmoral estate in Royal Deeside, Aberdeenshire. The landscape seen through the window reflects the weather when the artist Victoria Crowe first visited Birkhall to begin work on the portrait: ‘intensely vivid, with beautiful light... thick snow around and plummeting temperatures.’ Over the course of four sessions with King Charles, Crowe had little time to create preliminary sketches. She painted directly onto the canvas in order, as far as possible, to complete the portrait during these sittings. Crowe paints still lifes, interiors, landscapes and portraits and works in oil and in watercolour. A vital element of her portraiture is the relationship she develops with her sitters – she feels the most important portraits she has painted are ‘the ones of people who have enriched my own thinking or awareness.