
The Souvenir Albums

The Gala Performance at the Paris Opéra ©
Throughout their married life, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert commissioned watercolours recording places they had visited and events they had attended. These works were mounted in a series of ‘Souvenir Albums’, which acted as a visual counterpart to the Queen’s written Journals. The royal couple spent time together arranging the drawings and captioning the pages.
The albums were kept in precise chronological order, and the chosen artists were expected to work to a strict size limit. The albums became an important record of the couple’s happy life, and they travelled with the Queen when she moved around the country. In the 1920s the individual works were remounted in a new sequence. Queen Victoria also received commemorative albums as gifts. Among these was an album presented by Emperor Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie to commemorate the Queen’s visit to Paris in 1855, which included the spectacular view of a performance at the Paris Opéra by Eugène Lami and Jules Diéterle.
Caleb Robert Stanley (1795-1868)
Buckingham Palace: garden front from across the lake
Charlotte Canning, Viscountess Canning (1817-61)
View of Schloss Callenberg from the park
Georg Konrad Rothbart (1817-96)
Schloss Rosenau: the room used by Princes Ernest and Albert as children
Carl Georg Anton Graeb (1816-84)
Schloss Stolzenfels: The Great Knight's Hall
James William Giles (1801-70)
Lochnagar
Dillon, Frank (1823-1909)
The Britannia tubular bridge over the Menai Straits
Michael Angelo Hayes (1820-77)
Queen Victoria arriving to open the Exhibition of Irish Industry in Dublin, 30 August 1853
William Wyld (1806-89)
St George’s Hall, Liverpool
William Wyld (1806-89)
Manchester from Kersal Moor
William Wyld (1806-89)
The château of Saint-Cloud
Eugène Louis Lami (1800-90)
Gala Performance at the Paris Opéra, 21 August 1855
Carl Georg Anton Graeb (1816-84)
A distant view of Potsdam at sunset
Sir Oswald Walters Brierly (1817-94)
Naval Review off Spithead on 23 April 1856
George Arthur Fripp (1813-96)
Penrhyn Castle, view from the Queen's window
James Roberts (c. 1800-67)