A shore thing

Open skies, shifting clouds and the golden expanse of the beach have inspired artists from John Constable to Antony Gormley, but the sun-bathing throngs have proved a rather less popular subject, as Michael Prodger discovers

- Michael Prodger

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 any- thing 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 sky came at a cost.

When Constable turned to paint the beach, which he did many times, he removed as much of this noisome throng as possible and concentrated instead on the waves, scudding clouds and working boats bent over by the breeze. Holidaymakers do sometimes feature, but they tend to be blobs of paint, there to give a little bit of verticality to the broad horizontals of beach and sea. Or to poke fun at: in his 6ft-wide Chain Pier, Brighton, 1826–27, a pair of female promenaders battle the wind, shawls pulled tight and umbrella up, in their determination to benefit from the ozone-rich air come what may.