These pastels of King Friedrich Wilhelm III and Queen Luise of Prussia were made in 1797/98, at the same time that Faith and Love was written. They are the type of portraits that Novalis envisioned when he wrote that “every cultivated woman and every careful mother should have the queen’s picture in her own or her daughters’ drawing room”. The couple is shown without jewellery, crowns, or ermine and has an almost middle-class look: young, clear-eyed, and approachable, yet captivating and worthy of veneration. The cult that emerged around the young queen inspired and was expressed in such images.