A volume containing fifty chromolithographic views of the Great Exhibition, after watercolours by Louis Haghe and Joseph Nash, accompanied by explanatory text pages. Brown leather binding with blind and gilt tooling.

In his capacity as President of the Society of Arts, Prince Albert set up a committee to organise exhibitions with the aim of improving British industrial design. An exhibition in Birmingham in 1849 was followed by the first truly international exhibition, the Great Exhibition of Products of Industry of All Nations, held in Joseph Paxton's 'Crystal Palace' in Hyde Park, London, in the summer of 1851. Six million people visited the exhibition to see over 100,000 exhibits from around the world, divided broadly into raw materials, machinery, manufactures and the fine arts; Queen Victoria herself visited no fewer than thirty-four times. The substantial profits were used to establish the South Kensington Museum, renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1899.

Prince Albert commissioned forty-nine watercolours of the Great Exhibition, to be reproduced by Dickinson Bros in chromolithography, a new mechanical colour-printing process in keeping with the aims of the exhibition itself. Forty-three of the watercolours were executed by Joseph Nash (1808-78), and six by the Belgian artist Louis Haghe (1806-85). These watercolours remain in the Royal Collection today.