A watercolour view of the choir of St George's Chapel, Windsor, looking east toward the great window of The Resurrection by Benjamin West and the altar with a painting of the Last Supper, with three-tiered choir stalls and flags. Prepared for one of the plates in William Henry Pyne's History of the Royal Residences (1816-1819). Engraved by T. Sutherland, the print published 1.12.1818.

Pyne's History of the Royal Residences was a three-volume publication which encompassed a number of royal residences, including Windsor Castle (vol. 1) and Buckingham House (vol. 2), presenting 100 hand-coloured engravings of exteriors and interiors accompanied by descriptive texts. The 100 watercolours which were engraved for the publication survive in the Royal Library; these watercolours are exactly the size of the image on the printed plates, and may perhaps have been intended as colour guides for the artists responsible for hand-painting the monochrome prints.

Catalogue entry adapted from George III & Queen Charlotte: Patronage, Collecting and Court Taste (London, 2004)

During his periods of residence at Windsor, George III worshipped regularly at St George’s Chapel in the Lower Ward of the castle. The chapel is the religious seat of the Order of the Garter; the banners of the Garter Knights are here shown suspended over their stalls. Services were also occasionally held in the chapel in the State Apartments in the Upper Ward, splendidly decorated as part of Charles II’s work at Windsor. Among the King’s unexecuted schemes for Windsor was a ‘Chapel of Revealed Religion’ which would have replaced the seventeenth-century chapel.

This view of the east end of St George’s Chapel records many of the changes introduced there, at the King’s expense, between 1785 and 1791. These included additional choir stalls - brilliantly executed facsimiles of the fifteenth-century originals - and the virtual rebuilding of the altar wall, including a reredos designed by Thomas Sandby and a great stained-glass window of the Resurrection of Christ, painted by Benjamin West. Overall responsibility for the work was entrusted to Henry Emlyn (c.1729-1815), who was employed - as carpenter, builder and architect in the castle - by both the Office of Works and the Dean and Chapter; he retired from these positions in 1792, by which time the work was virtually complete. The King’s patronage of stained-glass painting - particularly at St George’s - was on a lavish scale, but few examples have survived.