A watercolour showing a topographical interior view of the Horn Room at Osborne , where Queen Victoria's birthday table was displayed 24 May 1849. The table is decorated with flowers and laden with presents, including three electrotype busts from the antique. On the far wall hang Winterhalter's portraits of the Duchess of Kent (RCIN 405129) and of Prince Alfred and Princess Helena (RCIN 403053), which were birthday gifts to Victoria from her mother and her husband, respectively. 

Victoria and Albert commissioned and collected many watercolours throughout their marriage documenting aspects of their public and private lives together, including a sequence of watercolours depicting the temporary birthday tables created on the occasion of the Queen’s birthday, 24th May. For the first seven years of her marriage Queen Victoria primarily spent her birthdays at the royal residence of Claremont in Surrey, but after 1848 the royal family were always (with one exception) at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight for the occasion. Every year a tradition which had begun in the Queen's childhood was observed. This was the arranging of a birthday table, laden with presents and embellished with floral arrangements, which by the second decade of her married life included more and more elaborate decorations; on her birthday in 1856 the Queen recorded that the room was “most tastefully decorated & arranged in quite a new way. The gilt cages with doves & the flags, had a charming effect.” Joseph Nash painted four depictions of these tables in the 1840s (including this one), but from 1851 James Roberts was given the commission. After Prince Albert’s death in 1861, the birthday tables were only photographed and never again painted.

This watercolour was originally mounted in View Album V. 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.