Queen Victoria's Buckingham Palace
This book tells the story of Queen Victoria's transformation of Buckingham Palace
JOSEPH NASH (1809-78)
The Queen's Birthday Table at Buckingham Palace. 24 May 1846
1846Pencil, watercolour and bodycolour | 17.6 x 20.2 cm (whole object) | RCIN 919923
A watercolour showing a topographical interior view of a room in Buckingham Palace, where Queen Victoria's birthday table was displayed 24 May 1846. The table is decorated with flowers and laden with presents, including Mary Thornycroft's plaster cast of Prince Albert Edward with Dandie, known as 'Winter' (RCIN 53090) and a Dernière mantel clock (RCIN 41210).
Victoria and Albert commissioned and collected many watercolours throughout their marriage documenting aspects of their public and private lives together, including a sequence of watercolours depicting the temporary birthday tables created on the occasion of the Queen’s birthday, 24th May. For the first seven years of her marriage Queen Victoria primarily spent her birthdays at the royal residence of Claremont in Surrey (she was at Buckingham Palace in 1846 as she was heavily pregnant with her third daughter Helena, who in fact was born the day after Victoria's own birthday), but after 1848 the royal family were almost always at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight for the occasion. Every year a tradition which had begun in the Queen's childhood was observed. This was the arranging of a birthday table, laden with presents and embellished with floral arrangements, which by the second decade of her married life included more and more elaborate decorations; on her birthday in 1856 the Queen recorded that the room was “most tastefully decorated & arranged in quite a new way. The gilt cages with doves & the flags, had a charming effect.” Joseph Nash painted four depictions of these tables in the 1840s (including this one), but from 1851 James Roberts was given the commission. After Prince Albert’s death in 1861, the birthday tables were only photographed and never again painted.
This watercolour was originally mounted in View Album III. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert compiled nine View Albums during their marriage. These albums contained watercolours and drawings documenting their life together and were arranged in chronological order. The albums were dismantled in the early twentieth century and rebound in new volumes both in a different arrangement and with additional items, but a written record of their original contents and arrangement still exists.
Victoria and Albert commissioned and collected many watercolours throughout their marriage documenting aspects of their public and private lives together, including a sequence of watercolours depicting the temporary birthday tables created on the occasion of the Queen’s birthday, 24th May. For the first seven years of her marriage Queen Victoria primarily spent her birthdays at the royal residence of Claremont in Surrey (she was at Buckingham Palace in 1846 as she was heavily pregnant with her third daughter Helena, who in fact was born the day after Victoria's own birthday), but after 1848 the royal family were almost always at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight for the occasion. Every year a tradition which had begun in the Queen's childhood was observed. This was the arranging of a birthday table, laden with presents and embellished with floral arrangements, which by the second decade of her married life included more and more elaborate decorations; on her birthday in 1856 the Queen recorded that the room was “most tastefully decorated & arranged in quite a new way. The gilt cages with doves & the flags, had a charming effect.” Joseph Nash painted four depictions of these tables in the 1840s (including this one), but from 1851 James Roberts was given the commission. After Prince Albert’s death in 1861, the birthday tables were only photographed and never again painted.
This watercolour was originally mounted in View Album III. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert compiled nine View Albums during their marriage. These albums contained watercolours and drawings documenting their life together and were arranged in chronological order. The albums were dismantled in the early twentieth century and rebound in new volumes both in a different arrangement and with additional items, but a written record of their original contents and arrangement still exists.
