The picture is one of a series of eleven English architectural subjects painted collaboratively by Antonio Visentini and Fransceso Zuccarelli for Consul Joseph Smith. Trained as a painter, Visentini had an association with Consul Smith which began around 1717, and led to his production in 1735 of a set of engravings after Canaletto's series of views of the Grand Canal in Smith's collection. Visentini was also to act as an architect and general artistic factotum for Smith until the latter's death in 1770. Smith and Visentini shared a great interest in the designs and theories of the sixteenth-century Venetian architect Andrea Palladio, whose work they considered superior to that of later baroque architects. Smith published a reprint of Palladio's architectural treatise, I quattro libri, in 1768, and in 1743-4 he had commissioned from Canaletto a series of pictures depicting Venetian monuments, including the principal buildings of Palladio in imaginary settings. It was perhaps the combination of their interest in Palladio and the commission to Canaletto that prompted Smith to commission the series of overdoor capricci of English neo-Palladian buildings to which this image belongs. Visentini painted the buildings using volumes of British architectural engravings for reference, whilst Francesco Zuccarelli painted most of the figures and all of the landscape settings. They date from 1746 and were possibly intended as overdoors for the Consul's villa at Mogliano, on the Venetian mainland near Treviso. Eight of the views were hung in the Entrance Hall at Buckingham House by 1819. They were moved to the Grand Corridor at Windsor Castle in 1828.

At the left is the riverside façade of old Somerset House, with a vaguely Italianate landscape at the centre and right. On the terrace in front of the house is a woman on horseback and a falconer on foot with attendants, hounds and another horse saddled. A pair of peacocks are to the left of this group, and at the top of the shallow steps more figures look on. Old Somerset House was designed by Inigo Jones. The architectural portion of this work is based on the elevation engraved in Colen Campbell's Vitruvius Britannicus, published in 1725, which misled Visentini about the wings on either side of the main block of the building; the correct contemporary appearance of the building is shown in pictures by Canaletto.

Although not signed or dated, the work is clearly part of the series by Visentini and Zuccarelli; judging by the style of Zuccarelli's landscape it may be one of the earlier pictures in the series, and possibly formed a pair with RCIN 407285.