Viva Brighton Issue #45 November 2016

BITS AND BOBS
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SECRETS OF THE ROYAL PAVILION:
THE FASHIONABLE STEYNE, C.1797
© Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton and Hove
This small watercolour and gouache painting
from c.1797 in the collection of the Royal Pavilion
and Brighton Museums is by the amateur
artist James Bennett (not to be confused with
the Victorian oil painter of the same name), who
created a number of simple but evocative images
of Brighton between the 1790s and the 1810s.
Most of them focus on the seafront, but in this
one the artist ventures a little bit inland, its main
intention being to capture the east front of the
Marine Pavilion, as it was then known. It is not
a hugely accomplished painting, and leaves a lot
to be desired when it comes to perspective and
architectural accuracy, but it paints a vivid picture
of Brighton in its heyday as a seaside resort.
The Pavilion as we see it here, viewed from the
east side of the Steine looking west, is still more
or less the architect Henry Holland’s building,
created for the Prince of Wales in 1787. It has
bow-fronted wings, a circular central room with
a shallow dome (which still forms the roof of the
Saloon but is now topped with John Nash’s large
central onion-shaped dome, added in 1818) and
a neo-classical colonnade. By the mid-1790s,
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