The Pavilion pivots 90°

Two hundred years ago, give or take a few months, this incredible image of Brighthelmstone beach and town was engraved by William Bernard Cooke after a watercolour painted the year before by the great John Mallard William Turner. The original watercolour is owned by Brighton & Hove Museums, though is not on permanent display because it cannot be exposed to light for very long.

After having been in private collections since 1830, the original watercolour came up at an auction in New York in 2012, and was purchased with help from the Art Fund, the Heritage Lottery Fund and private patrons. An essay on the painting by Dr Alexandra Loske, Art Historian and Curator at the Royal Pavilion, is available on the Museums website. She explains: ‘It was of utmost importance to secure this gem, as it is one of the few paintings by Turner that shows the Royal Pavilion.[. . .] In our watercolour Turner took a few compositional liberties for the sake of the ‘picturesque’ appeal of the image, for example turning the Pavilion by about 90 degrees to ensure the whole of its east front can be seen.’

Loske continues: ‘Compared to other paintings of Brighton by Turner our watercolour provides a surprising amount of detail. Many buildings of Brighton can be identified, among them St Nicholas’s Church, the Duke of York’s hotel, and Marine Parade under construction. The most prominent building is the recently finished Chain Pier, a bold cast-iron structure that seems to be withstanding strong waves and stormy conditions and is gleaming in the sunlight. It pushes its way into the composition with all the pride and confidence we see a few years later in other great cast iron structures, such as railway bridges and stations.’

The painting is both small and detailed because it was meant to be engraved, as it was, in 1825, by Cooke. He used this and other Turner originals to illustrate his book Picturesque Views of the Southern Coast of England (freely available to view at Googlebooks). 

Prints based on the watercolour - such as my own, which, as you can see, I’ve so artfully photographed against the white iron railings of the pier and the white foamy waves beyond - were also published individually.