A watercolour view of the Great Yellow Drawing Room at Claremont, with members of the exiled French royal family. Signed and dated "Eug. Lami 1850".

After the revolution in France of 1848, Louis-Philippe, King of the French, and his family escaped to England in disguise. They were granted permission by Queen Victoria to reside at Claremont House in Surrey. Louis-Philippe died there in 1850, and his wife Queen Marie-Amelie in 1866.

Louis-Philippe and Marie-Amelie commissioned this watercolour from Eugène-Louis Lami, who had been one of their court artists, to give to Queen Victoria on her birthday.  She recorded in her journal account for that day that "The King & Queen of the French sent me a drawing by Eugène Lami of the whole family, at Claremont, accompanied by kind letters." Victoria had this drawing mounted in one of her 'View Albums', a sequence of nine albums created by her and Prince Albert that effectively formed a chronological visual record of their marriage and the first twenty or so years of Victoria's reign. The original albums no longer survive, having been dismantled and rebound thematically, rather than chronologically, in the first half of the twentieth century.