A watercolour depicting a topographical interior view of the Private Chapel at Buckingham Palace.

Morison was commissioned in 1843 by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, who became keen collectors of the fashionable nineteenth-century watercolour genre of interior views, to paint a series of interiors of Buckingham Palace (RCINs 919897-919901, 919912 and 919917). With the exception of this one, all the watercolours were exhibited at the Old Watercolour Society annual exhibition in 1844, and attracted a satirical review from William Makepeace Thackeray, who was writing under the pseudonym Michael Angelo Titmarsh.

The Chapel was created by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1844 in what had been designed by John Nash as a conservatory. An earlier attempt to provide Queen Victoria with a chapel in the shell of George III's Octagon Library had proved unsatisfactory. The light blue and gold decorative scheme in the new chapel was introduced under Prince Albert's direction. The ceiling was later altered by Pennethorne to include a raised central lantern. On 13 September 1940 the chapel was destroyed in a German bombing raid, one of nine 'hits' suffered by Buckingham Palace during the Second World War. Originally King George VI had wanted the chapel rebuilt, but in view of the post-war building restrictions and the many other calls on funds, this plan was shelved. A new scheme, devised by the Duke of Edinburgh, to convert the chapel into an art gallery open to the public - while leaving a small part of the original private chapel in use - evolved under the direction of Lord Plunket in the late 1950s and the original Queen's Gallery was opened to the public on 25 July 1962. In the new Queen's Gallery the space pictured has been reworked as the Nash Gallery and the private chapel has been relocated within the south-eastern part of the palace.

Text adapted from Victoria & Albert: Art & Love, London, 2010