The arts were an important shared enthusiasm of Queen Victoria and her consort, Prince Albert, throughout their marriage. Of particular personal significance for them were the hundreds of watercolours they commissioned to form a pictorial record of their public and private lives together, and that they arranged in a series of volumes, called by Victoria the 'View Albums'.

In celebration of the bicentenary of the births of both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, this publication will accompany a touring exhibition of a group of outstanding works on paper, some of which have never before been published or publicly exhibited, that illuminate aspects of both Victoria's reign and the royal couple's passions.

The couple's commissions cover a range of subjects: events in the lives of the royal family; the spectacle and pageantry of the court; travel at home and abroad; scenes relating to the Crimean War ; the industrialisation of the Victorian age and the pair's private life.