BRIGHTON may have been George IV’s favourite seaside haunt—the town he made fashionable—but it wasn’t John Constable’s. ‘Brighton is the receptacle of the fashion and off-scouring of London,’ the painter wrote, with a curled lip, to his friend Archdeacon Fisher in 1824. The emotions summoned up by its vistas of the sea were, he said, ‘drowned in the din and tumult of stage coaches, gigs, flys, &c. and the beach is only Piccadilly or worse by the sea-side’.
He then went on to list its denizens: ‘Ladies dressed and undressed; gentlemen in morning-gowns and slippers, or without them or anything else… footmen, children, nursery-maids, dogs, boys, fishermen, and Preventive Service men with hangers and pistols.’ As if all this weren’t bad enough, the resort was further tarnished by the miasma of rotten fish and the sight and sound of ‘hideous amphibious animals, the old bathing-women’. For the painter, the benefits of sea bathing, salt air and an inspiring expanse of empty sea and
