A marble bust of Queen Alexandra when Princess of Wales with a fashionable hair style, her hair gathered in a bun at the back of the head and with a pad of curls at the front. She wears contemporary dress opened at the front with a laced border around the collar, with an approximation of her pearl drop brooch at the centre. The brooch was likely presented to her daughter Maud, later Queen Maud of Norway, and remains in the Norwegian royal collection. She has a cloak falling loosely over her shoulders, gathered at the centre in a fold, and a chocker around her neck embellished with a rosette motif with a pearl pendant in the centre.

Count Gleichen was the youngest of the three sons of Queen Victoria’s half-sister Princess Feodore, wife of Prince Ernest Christian of Hohenlohe Langenburg. After retiring from the navy, he pursued a career as a sculptor. He trained in the studio of the British neo-classical sculptor William Theed for three years. Despite his advantageous royal connections he became an accomplished and well-recognised sculptor. The busts of the Prince and Princess of Wales were exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1876 and the Art Journal stated that same year that the busts ‘are the latest likenesses that have been taken of the Royal Highnesses […]. The Count's modelling is now of a kind which ranks him truly among sculptors; these busts, and others in the present Academy exhibition, bear out in the amplest manner this assertion.'