This illustration of an early poem by Tennyson, the Chaucer-inspired A Dream of Fair Women (first published in 1832), reflects Prince Albert’s taste for Tennyson’s work. He received the watercolour for Christmas in 1859 from Queen Victoria. The Queen had admired a larger work by Corbould, portraying all the heroines of Tennyson’s poem, at exhibition earlier that year and subsequently commissioned this depiction of Helen of Troy and Iphigenia. Given to Albert, the Prince Consort for Christmas, 1859