Home and domestic life provided a common subject for the Queen’s watercolours and drawings. In 1843, she painted a deft portrait of her eldest son, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, with a parrot, and at around the same time made a searching pencil study of her own face. Archie and Annie MacDonald were the young children of Prince Albert’s gillie, and were painted by the Queen in the royal kennels at Windsor. At Balmoral, the Queen recorded the view ‘from the new approach’ in September 1854.