Viva Brighton Issue #83 January 2020

CURATOR’S CITY
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A design for the Royal Pavilion by Frederick Crace, watercolour, c.1815
Some of these will be shown
in a new exhibition that will
open in the Prints & Drawings
Gallery of Brighton Museum
in early May. I will be curating
this with Gordon Grant, who
has been working on the restoration
of the Pavilion interiors
for many years and has a real
eye for ornamental detail. We
have just started making our selection
for the display, which is
hugely enjoyable. Together we
are making new links to specific
parts of the Pavilion interiors,
which we are going to show in
the exhibition.
The highly detailed and brightly
coloured design drawings
reveal that the Craces often
copied directly from decorations
on Chinese porcelain,
wallpaper, Canton enamels
and embroidered textiles,
with little deviation from the
original colour schemes. They
also used printed sources, such
as the books published by the
artist William Alexander (1767–
1816), who accompanied the
Macartney Embassy to China
in the 1790s (see Viva Brighton
August 2018). In some cases we
can find a direct line from the
original source via the Crace
drawings to the final ornamental
detail in the Pavilion, as for
example in this sketch (above)
of Chinese mythological beasts,
which the Craces lifted from
a plate published by William
Alexander in 1805 showing a
scene inside a Chinese temple.
These motifs would eventually
appear in adapted form on laylights
upstairs in the Pavilion.
It just goes to show that it is
worth looking at the detail,
whether you are searching for
the devil, dragons, Foo-hum
birds or grotesque beasts.
Alexandra Loske, Art Historian
and Curator
Detail of a plate from William Alexander’s The Costume of China, 1805
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