In the early months of 1854, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert commissioned the photographer Roger Fenton (1819–69) to take a series of portraits of the royal couple and their children. This photograph is from a sitting in February. 

The Queen is depicted surrounded by her four eldest children. She is posed and dressed, not as monarch, but as mother: a tartan shawl over her shoulders, a pair of scissors tied to her waist, and her right arm holding her daughter, Princess Alice.