A watercolour showing Queen Victoria investing the Emperor Napoleon III into the Order of the Garter in the Garter Throne Room at Windsor Castle, with the Empress Eugénie watching the ceremony from a seat in the right foreground.

In September 1854 Prince Albert visited the military camp at Boulogne (see, for example, RCIN 920050) at the invitation of Napoleon III, who the British had allied with - along with Turkey and Sardinia - in the Crimean War against Russia. The following year, the Emperor and his wife were invited to make a State Visit to England, in part an attempt to persuade Napoleon III against carrying out a wish to travel to the Crimea to lead his army. This watercolour depicts the Garter ceremony, at which Napoleon III was made a Knight, on 18 April; Victoria wrote in her journal that during the ceremony they were all, including the Emperor, “very nervous”.

The Emperor and Empress spent three days at Windsor and three staying at Buckingham Palace in London. In addition to that depicted here, events included a State Dinner held in St George’s Hall at Windsor, a trip to the opera in Covent Garden (RCIN 920055), a military review and a visit to the Crystal Palace at Sydenham (RCINs 920231 and 919991). Victoria and Albert then travelled to Paris in August of the same year for a reciprocal State Visit (see, for example, RCIN 920059).

Later in 1855 Paul & Dominic Colnaghi published a volume titled ‘The Visit of their Imperial Majesties the Emperor and Empress of the French, to Her Most Gracious Majesty The Queen’. This comprised lithographs after watercolours (inlcuding this one) commissioned from George Housman Thomas and Louis Haghe by Victoria and Albert of scenes from the visit, and accompanying letterpress descriptions. The introduction stressed the important context to this particular royal visit, and also the “intrinsic and exclusive value” of the illustrations because of the presence, by command, of the artists at the events depicted.