A watercolour showing a distant view of the Solent, with slabs of building stone in the foreground. Inscribed 'Osborne' with an illegible date on the side of one of the stone slabs.

Osborne House on the Isle of Wight was built by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert between 1845 and 1851 as a private family home, designed by Albert himself in the style of an Italian palazzo. Queen Victoria described it as their "sweet seaside home" (Queen Victoria's Journal, 26 August 1850). The artist William Leighton Leitch taught the Queen and, later, the royal children and Princess of Wales watercolour painting, and often visited Osborne to do so. This watercolour had an attribution on the original album sheet to Leitch and Charlotte Canning, one of Victoria's ladies-in-waiting and an extremely accomplished amateur artist; it is probably primarily by Canning, with Leitch assisting with elements of the composition and colouring. It was Lady Canning who recommended Leitch as a teacher to the queen.

This watercolour was originally mounted in View Album IV. 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.