A visit to the Royal Pavilion, Brighton, is an overwhelming aesthetic experience and it is the extravagant, sumptuous richness of the interiors described by the writer Richard Sickelmore in the 1820s as a ‘splendour of light and colour’ which makes it a fitting venue for the display Regency Colour and Beyond, 1785-1850.

George, Prince of Wales, first visited Brighton in 1783, prompted by his desire to escape the restrictions of the Court, and encouraged by his doctors to enjoy the medical benefits of seawater. At first he lodged in a farmhouse by the Steine, installing Mrs Fitzherbert in a villa nearby. By 1787, his debts temporarily cleared, he commissioned Henry Holland to transform the farmhouse into a grander residence – the Marine Pavilion – with a central rotunda, today the Saloon, and two wings in neoclassical style. By 1801 he was looking for something more romantic and of Holland’s designs for the exterior he chose one in the ‘Chinese’ taste. This was never carried out, however brilliantly coloured Chinese wallpaper would later set the theme for the interior decoration in its Regency reincarnation carried out by Frederick Crace. After becoming Regent in 1811, George employed John Nash, who had worked on Carlton House in London, and who, following the ‘Indian’ style of the earlier stable block, clothed the Pavilion exterior in a fantastic ‘Indian’ array of domes, tented roofs and minarets, adding the Great Kitchen and Banqueting Room to the West, and Music Room to the East. The interior decoration of this phase of transformation was overseen by Crace and was completed in 1823, three years after the Prince Regent succeeded as George IV. The design of the Banqueting Room was the work of Robert Jones, Crace’s principal assistant who began to work for the Prince Regent in 1815. After his death in 1830, William IV and Queen Adelaide occasionally used the Pavilion, followed by Queen Victoria until 1845 when she acquired Osborne on the Isle of Wight. The Pavilion was then drastically stripped of furniture and fittings before being sold to Brighton Corporation in 1850. Redecoration was started in the mid-nineteenth century and over the years items were reinstalled from the Royal Collections, but it is only in more recent years that a thorough programme of research has been undertaken to restore the Pavilion to how it looked in 1822.

Embedded into the standard visitor itinerary of the Royal Pavilion with informative panels positioned at various places, the special display Regency Colour and Beyond is the fruit of this continuous programme of conservation of the Pavilion’s extraordinarily rich and colourful interiors, charting the changes from the eighteenth century through the Regency period and subsequently, and an increasing interest in all aspects of colour theory that accompanied this development.

The theoretical backdrop to the explosion of colour seen in the interiors of the Pavilion is explored through an interesting collection of contemporary books displayed in a small area on the ground floor of the Pavilion. Among the books on view is a rare copy of Moses Harris’ The Natural System of Colours, published in 1766 and edited and republished in 1811. Following on from Isaac Newton’s seminal publication from 1704, Opticks, where Newton demonstrated that white light is a mixture of different coloured lights, represented by a wheel of seven colours, Harris described how, by adding two intermediate gradations between each of the three subtractive primary colours and their secondaries on a colour wheel the total number of colours was brought to eighteen. Each edition of Harris’ book was dedicated to the respective Presidents of the Royal Academy – the first edition to Sir Joshua Reynolds and the second, displayed here, to Benjamin West. Many more publications were to appear in the nineteenth century such as George Field’s Chromatics: or an Essay on the Analogy and Harmony of Colours, published in 1817 and shown here open at ‘Example XVI, Analogous scale of sound and colours’, where Field reveals a much more scientific attitude to colour mixing than that taken by Harris. Although not translated into English until 1840, the ideas embodied in Goethe’s colour theories, where he drew attention to the symbolic applications of colour and their capacity for mystical allusion, had been aired in English art circles around 1800 and Mary Gartside’s Essay on Light and Shade, on Colours and on Composition in General, published in 1805, attests to this fact. Gartside’s Essay discusses the arrangement of colours into groups of warm, cold, and light colours and explores harmonising tints, illustrated here with one of her freely painted watercolour blots. The inclusion of a portable watercolour box from c. 1840 in the display not only references the increasing popularity among amateurs of the medium – a medium that encourages the experimentation with colour – but also acknowledges its employment in explorations of colour theory such as that undertaken by Gartside. Finally, of particular interest in the context of the Royal Pavilion decorations, the display points to the range of contemporary architectural handbooks that rarely included illustrations but offered paint recipes and instructions on how to achieve many of the decorative finishes used in the Pavilion. 

One questions, however, how well read the Prince Regent himself was in contemporary colour theories, or whether he preferred simply to indulge his instinctive and often experimental approach to decoration. Indeed, George IV’s personal predilections, not least his love of chinoiserie and oriental artefacts, played a major part in the decoration of the Pavilion. Illustrated books on China, including William Alexander’s brightly coloured illustrations of his travels in the 1790s, were very influential. His Costumes of China (1805) is on display, open at the page showing a ‘Chinese Comedian’, which decorators John and Frederick Crace copied for the central glass screen on the landing of the North Staircase. Frederick Crace’s sketchbook, with sixty-eight coloured designs drawn from Chinese ornaments, also shows the influence of porcelain, enamels and textiles. The impact of the range of strong colours seen in Chinese wallpaper and export paintings on George IV’s decorators is demonstrated by a large painting titled Market Festival that teems with brightly coloured figures and is dominated by vivid red and green hues. Attention is drawn to the role of a number of new synthetic pigments in replicating the impact of the colours coveted in Chinese prototypes and extrapolating from them an all-encompassing decorative scheme. Prussian Blue, for example, a pigment first made at the beginning of the eighteenth century in Germany and commercially produced in England in 1724, was used for the wallpaper of the Banqueting Room together with Blue Verditer heightening, shadows of a darker blue, and embellished with silver. Chrome Yellow, discovered in 1797 by the French Chemist L.N. Vauquelin and made commercially available in 1818, was also used extensively in the Pavilion; fragments of block-printed Chrome Yellow dragon paper, designed by Robert Jones in 1821 for the Yellow Bow Rooms, are among the original examples of wallpaper on display. Now recreated by John Perry wallpapers of London for the Pavilion’s restoration, this design provides a good example of the use of primary colours in high saturation that pervades the decorative scheme of the Pavilion interiors. Contrasted with grey-blue drapes and the grisaille trompe-l’oeil fretwork dado of the Yellow Bow Rooms, the chrome yellow wallpaper provides a striking golden background for the Chinese export paintings that hang on it and are likewise embellished with trompe-l’oeil frames.

On the first floor there is a display entitled ‘Making Regency Colour’, featuring minerals and other natural materials from which pigments were made, shown together with a variety examples from the decoration of the Pavilion that use each of the resulting colours, including silver and gold. Particularly fascinating is the use of carmine (an intense red colour made from an organic dye produced from crushed cochineal beetles) as a glaze over silver, demonstrated in the display with a fragment of a carved dragon’s claw that has been coated with this technique, giving it a luminous pinkish tint. Such glazes were often applied to decorative objects to enhance their richness by making their surfaces more light-reflective. Indeed, the combination of light and mirrors in the Pavilion was conceived with this in mind, and nowhere more so than in the Music Room. Here Chinese scenes taken from William Alexander’s illustrations are painted in ‘rich red heightened with gold’ on canvases made to resemble lacquer, framed in gold and held up by painted dragons. Carved and silvered serpents entwine in the blue satin drapes embellished with gold tassels. Gilding was used to great effect, especially on the cockle shells that decorate the dome at the centre of the ceiling; as the cockles diminish in size towards the apex so too does the tone of the gilding change to increase the illusion of height. Gas light would originally have poured in through large lozenge-shaped stained glass windows high up in the coving supporting the dome, throwing patterns on the brightly coloured carpet while the King listened to his orchestra and the organ beneath its sounding canopy of ‘bamboo’. The room is otherwise lit by nine indescribably ornate lotus-shaped hanging chandeliers painted with colourful Chinese figures which descend from the ceiling. The result is a unique setting of splendour befitting of George IV’s flamboyant taste.

In the Saloon, which is under restoration but still accessible to visitors, one can trace the changes from Holland’s original Marine Pavilion of the 1780s, part of whose structure is at present visible, to George’s fully-blown Regency extravaganza. Originally decorated by Biagio Rebecca in neoclassical style, three roundels of classical heads and the face of an allegorical figure survive, and are on view in the display, painted in colours that appear low-key by comparison with the opulence of the Regency period. In 1802-04 large panels of Chinese wallpaper and a painted sky ceiling were introduced by the Craces with the dominant colour scheme of blue with yellow and some splashes of red. By 1823 Robert Jones’ scheme becomes much more majestic with all the elements linked by an ‘Indian’ theme, as recorded in images from John Nash’s Views of the Royal Pavilion (reproduced in the display leaflet). Red takes over as the predominant hue in resplendent silk panels framed by matt and burnished gold and set off by the white lacquer doors, dado and furniture which are in turn embellished in gold and silver detailing.

The individual displays illustrating the theme of ‘Regency Colour and Beyond’ contain much fascinating information, even if they are somewhat difficult to appreciate in depth against a cacophony of audio guides, being located as they are on the prescribed visitor route around the Pavilion. They need to be studied in conjunction with the informative introductory leaflet, which sets out clearly the chosen themes which are not immediately apparent from the displays themselves. With this in hand, however, the display does much to enhance our understanding of the amazing interior decoration of the Royal Pavilion and the material presented merits a substantial catalogue for further exploration of this remarkable subject.

‘Regency Colour and Beyond, 1785-1850’ is at the Royal Pavilion, Brighton, from 15 June to 13 October 2013.