A watercolour showing the interior of the Guildhall, London, during the ball held on 9 July 1851 to celebrate the successful opening of the Great Exhibition. Queen Victoria is seated on a throne with Prince Albert standing beside her and a great throng of people in the foreground. Signed and dated at the far left: Will Wyld 1851.

In his capacity as President of the Society of Arts, Prince Albert set up a committee to organise exhibitions with the aim of improving British industrial design. An exhibition in Birmingham in 1849 was followed by the first truly international exhibition, the Great Exhibition of Products of Industry of All Nations, held in Joseph Paxton's 'Crystal Palace' in Hyde Park, London, in the summer of 1851. Six million people visited the exhibition to see over 100,000 exhibits from around the world, divided broadly into raw materials, machinery, manufactures and the fine arts; Queen Victoria herself visited no fewer than thirty-four times. The substantial profits were used to establish the South Kensington Museum, renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1899. The Queen wrote to her uncle Leopold, King of the Belgians, that the inaugeration of the Great Exhibition was the "greatest day in our history."

The ball, attended by Victoria and Albert, was intended to enable the Queen "to receive, in a scene of festivity, the Commissioners and other persons of our own and foreign nations by whose labours the Exhibition has been made so splendid and so successful" (Illustrated London News, 12 July 1851, pp. 41-2). Victoria thought the Guildhall was "beautifully decorated" for the occasion, though very hot and crowded (Queen Victoria's Journal, 9 July 1851).

This watercolour may have been presented to Victoria and Albert as a souvenir of the occasion. It was originally mounted by them 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.