He achieved immediate success with the first pair of portraits he painted for the Queen in 1842 -- the light backgrounds of his portraits always appealed to her -- and he painted thereafter, at regular intervals, two more pairs of full-lengths which replaced all earlier portraits as official likenesses and of which innumerable copies and variants were produced. These official portraits were in addition to many more likenesses of the Queen and Prince produced by Winterhalter on varying scales and in varying moods. The royal children were painted at regular intervals in order to create carefully designed sequences and groups. Friends and favourites at home and visitors from abroad also sat to Winterhalter for the Queen. If he had time between more important sitters, or between painting portraits on the scale of life, Winterhalter would produce small "vignetted" portraits, chiefly of the ladies in the Queen's Household, such as the German-born Duchess of Manchester, which are among his most delightfully spontaneous works.

The range of works Winterhalter produced for the Queen can be judged from one series: the portraits of the Princess Royal and her husband. The little Princess was among the first subjects painted by Winterhalter in 1842: sitting on the ground with flowers in her lap ("a delightful picture", wrote the Queen). Seven years later she figured in a group in a landscape with her sisters. Then, in 185 1, she was painted in the costume she wore at the opening of the Great Exhibition in 1851 and this portrait initiated the set of roundels which Winterhalter eventually painted of all the royal children. At the same time Winterhalter painted the young Prince Frederick William and his sister (" a very successful head") who had come over for the occasion. In June 1857, a large formal oval of the Princess initiated a series of portraits of her daughters and daughters-in-law which the Queen gradually put together. In 1862 Winterhalter completed the large life-sized group of the Crown Prince and Princess with their two eldest children ("I admire it so much. Papa wld. have been so delighted with it"). It was designed, and framed, to hang in the Dining-Room at Osborne, at right angles, and as a sequel, to Winterhalter's large group of the family in 1846, in which the Princess Royal was looking protectively at the infant Princess Helena. Finally, in 1867, Winterhalter painted for the Crown Prince and Princess the distinguished pair of head-and-shoulder portraits which they hung in the Kaiser Friedrich Palais in Berlin; but in her will the Crown Princess left them to her eldest brother. There were of course those who considered it unfortunate that Winterhalter had received so much royal patronage.