In July 1854, Queen Victoria commissioned Duppa to take a photograph of her, as a surprise for her husband. The portrait shows the Queen holding a framed copy of a portrait of Prince Albert taken by the same photographer a few months earlier. A number of the Victorian photographs in the Photograph Collection were re-photographed, or sometimes reprinted from the original negative, presumably to guard against fading, after the discovery of the permanent carbon process in the 1860s. Much of this work, as in this case, was undertaken by the firm of Hughes & Mullins, of Ryde in the Isle of Wight. In some cases, the original photographs are preserved underneath the carbon prints.