Orange Prince is considered an important late work referencing Warhol's portraits from the early 1960s, of movie stars and celebrity icons, such as Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Jacqueline Kennedy.

He says that Warhol was drawn to Prince's edgy image, which acted as inspiration for the art work:"(Warhol's) evident fascination with Prince, known for sexual frankness in his music and an androgynous style in his clothes, make-up, and hairstyle, echoed similar traits among those he famously gathered around himself in the Factory entourage of the 1960s.

[5] Vanity Fair then commissioned Warhol, who created a cropped, highly colorized painting using just Prince's head from the photograph.

The composition of Orange Prince makes direct reference to the portraits Warhol produced in the 1960s, as Crow points out in his 2018 analysis of the painting.

As Crow says: "Warhol's 1984 portraits (of Prince) ... harked back to the independently conceived celebrity likenesses of his earlier career (from the 1960s).

Highlights of green and blue are woven onto the screen amongst the black line around the subject's facial features, hair and ears.

The overall effect is to make the subject luminesce, with a trade-mark Warhol flatness to the image, due partly to the very little graduation of shading.

The club was only half-full, but as music critic Nik Cohn reported, "Andy Warhol and his claque showed up, and so did a number of music-biz faces.

[11] In the December 1981 edition of Warhol's Interview magazine Prince appears in a controversial image showing him in the shower, and a crucifix on the wall behind.

"[8] Afterwards at the New York dance club, The Palladium, Warhol reported that he was very excited to be invited to an after-party hosted by Prince, and fascinated by him.

Warhol described arriving at the party and seeing Prince appear in the near-empty club "...in a white coat and pink bellbottoms, like a Puerto Rican at a prom, all by himself".

The technique was popularised by Warhol, and is synonymous with the artist from the 1960s onwards, when he produced his early portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando, and other Hollywood movie stars and celebrities of the time.

Either by transferring the penciled line by pressing onto the front of the acetate or sheet of paper, or by placing a sheet of carbon paper beneath the tracing and then drawing the line one section at a time, a rough guide was established for each color area, for example, the lips and the eyelids.

The colors were then brushed on by hand, often with the use of masking tape to create a clean junction between them, with the eventual imposition of the black screened image also serving to obscure any unevenness in the line.

In the Death and Disaster series of paintings the graphic images Warhol took from tabloid newspaper stories of the time are a stark counterpoint to the candy-color palette.

"[2]Marilyn Diptych, 1962, is an early example of iconography in Warhol's work, the image repeated many times to emphasise the ubiquity of celebrity and references a form of religious painting in its title.

[28][29] Art historian Robert Rosenblum was personally close to Warhol and wrote about Warhol's Catholic religious observance, which informed Rosenblum's observation about the 1962 Gold Marilyn in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art: "When Warhol took a photographic silkscreen of Marilyn Monroe's head, set it on gold paint, and let it float high in a timeless, spaceless heaven ..., he was creating, in effect, a secular saint for the 1960s that might well command as much earthly awe and veneration as, say, a Byzantine Madonna hovering for eternity on a gold mosaic ground.

Part of Warhol's achievement was to legitimize his love of secular, profane subjects by attaching to them traditional religious values.

[34] Featured in both the November 1984 and the April 2016 editions of Vanity Fair, reproduced in color on a full page to illustrate the article entitled Purple Fame, about Prince's rise to fame in the wake of his celebrated 1984 album and movie Purple Rain, the inspiration for Warhol's portrait.

Andy Warhol: Portraits of the Seventies and Eighties - Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney, and in the Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London.

[42] Despite originally licensing the photograph and the co-credit in Vanity Fair back in 1984, Goldsmith alleged that she had been unaware of the existence of the illustration and the Prince Series until 2016, over 30 years later when she saw the Condé Nast cover.

[5] Goldsmith informed the Foundation that she believed these additional works were copyright violations of her photograph and stated her intent to seek legal action.