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.
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,…
