In 1801, on her return from Russia where she stayed for six years, Elizabeth Vigée-Le Brun stopped for six months in Berlin where she was lionized by Hohenzollern. Three days after arriving in Berlin she was invited to Potsdam. Greatly charmed by the Queen of Prussia, she later wrote in her Souvenirs: 'but here my pen must remain powerless for it cannot convey the impression that my first meeting with this Princess made upon me. Her charming and heavenly face shone with an expression of gentle virtue and she possessed the finest and most regular features. The beauty of her figure, her neck, her arms, the dazzling freshness of her complexion, everything about her surpassed the most perfect ideal. She was in deep mourning and wore a crown made with spikes of jet which, far from unbecoming, gave her pallid cheeks a certain radiance. You would have to see the Queen of Prussia to understand how this vision held me spellbound,' E. Vigée-Le Brun, The Memoirs of Elizabeth Vigée-Le Brun, London, 1989, p. 230. The deep admiration evidently expressed by the artist for the Queen of Prussia did not solely derive from her noble features. In an age fascinated by physiognomy, Elizabeth Vigée-Le Brun was in fact describing an ideal portrait of a perfect Queen, exalting the royalist virtues of a good ruler, who was a passionate opponent of the French Revolution. Louisa Augusta Wilhelma Amelia von Mecklemburg Strelitz was a declared enemy of Napoleon, who openly encouraged her husband King Frederich Wilhelm III to go to war and favoured the Russian alliance. Such a courageous and determined woman could not fail to appeal to the artist, herself an exile and loyal admirer of the martyred Queen Marie-Antoinette. Queen Louisa's patronage of Madame Vigée-Le Brun was, in part, a political gesture.

The final painted version of the present pastel has not been traced but a lithograph after it was used as a frontispiece of the third volume of the artist's Souvenirs.

Joseph Baillo confirms, on the basis of a colour transparency the attribution of the present pastel. He intends to include it in his forthcoming catalogue raisonné