A watercolour depicting the royal party in the foreign nave of the Crystal Palace following the opening of the Great Exhibition on 1 May 1851. Signed and dated at bottom right: Joseph Nash 1851. 

This is one of four watercolours Nash painted for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert which were reproduced as chromolithographs (also made by Nash) for sale in 1851; early proofs of the prints were put on display at the Great Exhibition itself by the end of July. 

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. The Queen wrote to her uncle Leopold, King of the Belgians, that the inaugeration of the Great Exhibition was the "greatest day in our history."