Kneller was born in Lubeck, studied with Rembrandt in Amsterdam and by 1676 was working in England as a fashionable portrait painter. He painted seven British monarchs (Charles II, James II, William III, Mary II, Anne, George I and George II), though his portraits of Charles II are no longer in the collection, and in 1715 was the first artist to be made a Baronet (the next was John Everett Millais in 1885). A set of portraits of naval heroes was given by George IV to the Royal Naval Hospital in Greenwich in 1824.

This portrait was probably painted in the Winter of 1703-4 when the sitter was in England prior to his sailing for Spain with a Royal Naval escort. After the death of Charles II of Spain (1661-1700) the Archduke Charles was Britain's favoured candidate to succeed him in order to prevent a Bourbon claimant that would effectively unite the Spanish and French thrones. In 1711 the Archduke Charles inherited the Holy Roman Empire and was crowned Charles VI; his candidature thus threatened a unification of the German and Spanish crowns, an outcome deemed by the British to be equally disruptive. After this British enthusiasm for the whole matter cooled.

The sitter is here shown standing in armour, wearing the collar of the Golden Fleece, with a baton in his right hand and his left resting on a crown; in the background is an English warship with a smaller vessel firing a salute and troops on the shore.