A watercolour of the interior of the Picture Gallery at Buckingham Palace. Signed and dated: Douglas Morison 1843.

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). All but one of these 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.

This watercolour shows the Picture Gallery at Buckingham Palace as designed by John Nash, which followed an architectural tradition established in the eighteenth century in being a long, rectangular top-lit space terminated with a columned screen at the south end. Nash also made a feature of the ceiling, as can be clearly seen here, with a striking hammerbeam design incorporating pendant arches and domes running the length of the gallery on both sides. The four chimneypieces in the gallery (three of which are visible here) were designed by Nash and made by Joseph Browne in Carrara marble. Each featured a central medallion with a carved portrait of an Old Master - those chosen for inclusion (Titian, Dürer, Van Dyck, Leonardo and Rembrandt, who was the subject of a fifth portrait on a chimneypiece later moved to the East Gallery) reflected the strength of Old Masters in the Royal Collection.

The pictures, seen here hung in three dense tiers, were first displayed in this manner in 1836. When Johann David Passavant saw the gallery, he declared it "the most perfect assemblage of Dutch pictures I know". The art historian Anna Jameson, writing in 1844, thought the arrangement was unsuccessful, however, with many of the "small and delicate pictures" almost impossible to see through being hung too high and poor lighting. In the early 1850s Prince Albert sought to bring greater order to the display of Old Master paintings, and radically transformed the appearance of the gallery in collaboration with the architect James Pennethorne. See RCIN 919917 for a watercolour illustrating the appearance of the Picture Gallery in 1853 with lilac walls and uniform gold picture frames after Prince Albert's redecoration; this scheme also no longer survives.