Despite constant nay-saying from men who didn't want her to make it, Schwartze was one of the greatest and most successful portraitists of late 19th century Dutch society. 

Still, she had to really grease the royal wheels to convince Queen Emma to allow her to paint her daughter, Wilhelmina, in full regalia. Always the diplomatic professional, Schwartze, according to art historians, enlarged Wilhelmina's eyes, gave her a tummy tuck, and made her neck more swanlike. Thérèse Schwartze was hip to political readings of her work, and she would have benefited from such interpretations in the case of her portrait of Queen Wilhelmina. According to biographers, she placed the portrait strategically at its debut exhibition, so that socialist viewers, who were against the monarchy, could appreciate it as the work of a great female artist depicting a strong female leader. Monarchists, of course, could enjoy it for its embellishment of the royal order.

Schwartze had art in her bloodline. Her father, Johann Georg Schwartze, was a painter who bucked social conventions of his day by priming her, rather than some young man unrelated to him, to become his artistic successor. When Schwartze was seventeen, her father did a portrait of her, which is now in the collection of the Rijksmuseum. Thérèse and Lizzy Ansingh, the daughters of Thérèse Schwartze's sister, Clara Theresia, became artists, and Thérèse Schwartze's other sister, Georgine, was a sculptor. In her fifties, the artist married Anton van Duyl, the editor of the Algemeen Handelsblad newspaper, so some of her works bear her married name, van Duyl-Schwartze. Queen Wilhelmina and Lizzy Ansingh also created an annual cash prize for artists under the age of thirty-five in Schwartze's married name..

A few years before she painted the Queen, Schwartze made a study and a trio of finished paintings of girls in an Amsterdam orphanage. Her undated study, showing the face of one girl, is named Weesmeisje ("Orphan Girl," Rijksmuseum). Her paintings of the orphans, in chronological order, are Drie meisjes uit het Amsterdamse Burgerweeshuis ("Three girls from the Amsterdam Burgerweeshuis," Rijksmuseum), Vijf weesmeisjes ("Five Orphan Girls," Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen), and Amsterdamse weesmeisjes ("Amsterdam Orphan Girls," Amsterdam Museum). The orphanage was called the Burgerweeshuis, and it is still world-famous for its influence on practices of making children wards of the state. When Schwartze used its residents as her models, the Burgerweeshuis had already been open three hundred years. The building is now the home of the Amsterdam Museum, which maintains Schwartze's Amsterdamse weesmeisjes in the very rooms where its models once lived.

Other artists of the time, including Nicolaas van der Waay, Karel Klinkenberg, and Max Liebermann, chose the same institution to find models. According to biographers, Schwartze and the other artists were not making an "exposé" or any kind of political statement. This is hard to believe, I know! But we can't ignore the fact that we are processing this information after 130 years of history, in which the struggles of orphans have become a much bigger part of the public conscience. The girls' distinctive clothing, red and black for the municipal colors of Amsterdam, were supposed to make the girls stand out in the case that they ran away, and the artists found their appearances striking. Maybe we should consider the possibility that artists and viewers looked at these girls with a sense of pride in their city and nation, pride that Amsterdam was caring for them.