Robert Goff in Hove: Wick Studio, Holland Road

Brighton Sands, c1897. Etching by Robert Charles Goff (FA202998)

The display of Robert Goff’s etchings and watercolours in the Prints and Drawings Gallery of Brighton Museum & Art Gallery (until 27 April 2012) shows what a peripatetic lifestyle Goff led and how much he enjoyed travelling. However, he seems to have been particularly drawn to Sussex throughout his life and kept a place in Hove for the best part of 33 years. His love of Brighton and Hove is reflected in some of his finest and most popular etchings, such as The West Pier, The Metropole Hotel  or Brighton Sands.

Goff moved into a large house on the east side of Adelaide Crescent in or around 1889. He left the house in 1903 to move to Italy with his second wife Clarissa, but kept a studio in Holland Road until his death in 1922. This studio was probably purpose-built for Goff in the 1890s. It was a white, double gabled house that backed onto his home in Adelaide Crescent and was connected to it via some steps which are still there today. In this studio he would probably have had a small to medium sized printing press and many of the etchings in our collection were almost certainly produced there. Even after he left to live in Italy, Goff remained involved with the Brighton and Hove art scene by exhibiting his work at the Brighton Arts Club and as an active member of the Brighton Fine Arts Sub-Committee. It seems that Goff got on very well with Henry Roberts, Chief Librarian and Curator of Brighton Museum from 1906.

Holland Road, 1912, etching by Goff. Courtesy of Alexandra Loske.

This image shows an etching from 1912 of his studio in Holland Road. It is a lovingly composed view of a place that was clearly very important to him. The mother and child in the foreground may be significant: Goff’s first wife Beatrice and their young son Francis died a few years after they had moved to Hove. These figures might be a deliberate or unconscious association with this place. Goff also included a very similar view of his studio in miniature as part of a large index plate for a catalogue of his work in 1898. In this small version the woman and child are replaced by a solitary male figure.

Catalogue plate to an index of work by Robert Charles Goff, 1898.

Holland Road, 2012. Courtesy of Alexandra Loske

Although Holland Road is much changed now the house still exists. No trace of Goff remains there, but in his house in Adelaide Crescent (converted into separate apartments after he left) there are a couple of large Moorish mirrors which he probably brought back from his travels to North Africa and left behind because they would have been too large for Wick Studio.

Alexandra Loske,
Curator of the exhibition Robert Goff – An Etcher in the Wake of Whistler

A week to remember at the Royal Pavilion & Museums

Staff at the Royal Pavilion & Museums celebrated a series of truly amazing announcements and events last week making it one of the most memorable in the service’s history. Read on to discover how the Beach Boys, Queen Victoria, the Arts Council and JMW Turner helped to make our unforgettable week!

It started on Sunday 22 January with the Royal Pavilion’s free day. The annual event marks the purchase by the town of the Royal Pavilion from Queen Victoria in 1850. This year’s People’s Palace Open Day campaign struck a cord with local residents and visitors alike. From 9.30am the queue snaked through the Royal Pavilion gardens throughout the day as people waited for the opportunity to see the spectacular palace for free. In all, staff welcomed 3,262 visitors to the building. This is about 1,000 more than would normally visit on a busy weekend in peak season in the summer.

Sunday was also the closing day of the Royal Pavilion Ice Rink. The rink has yet again been a huge success boosting the city’s winter tourist economy and contributing to increased visitor numbers at both the Royal Pavilion and Brighton Museum. We look forward to welcoming the team back again in November 2012.

On Monday 23 January it was announced that Brighton Museum & Art Gallery had been successful in its bid to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport /Wolfson Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund for £100,000. The grant will be used to transform one of the existing museum galleries into a space where displays can be changed quickly, bringing more of the museum’s outstanding collections into the public eye. New flexible display cases, complete with the latest digital technology, will help to modernise the museum and enable staff to work more closely with young people, community groups and digital media companies.

You can read the press release here.

On Tuesday 24 January it was announced that the service was one of just 16 in the country to receive prestigious Arts Council Renaissance Major Partner awards. Although the service has received Renaissance funding as part of a South East consortia of Museums for the last 7 years, for 2012/15 the awards were based on open applications from museum services across the country. Over the next three years the grant will fund, among other things, better access to exhibits via digital technology, more exhibitions and collaborations, skills training for staff and artists, apprenticeships, improved marketing, developments in fundraising, and work to provide leadership within the museums sector in the region.

The Royal Pavilion & Museums was praised for its £2.7 million application which represented:

‘a highly imaginative and innovative response to the Arts Council’s goals. Rooted firmly in confidence of the range and recognised significance of its collections as its core asset, the service presents a well evidenced and inspirational application to build on current practice and achieve excellence over the next three years.’

You can read the press release here.

On Wednesday 25 January a member of our night team pointed us to some amazing You Tube footage they had found of the Beach Boys playing on the roof of the Royal Pavilion in the early 1970s. We posted a link via our popular social media channels and was widely shared.

On Thursday 26 January with a significant grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF),  along with an award from the Art Fund, the national fundraising charity for art, and a donation from the Royal Pavilion & Museums Foundation, we successfully bid on a JMW Turner watercolour being auctioned at Christies in New York.

The watercolour was purchased for $352,500 (£225,000), and is believed to have been painted in 1824-5. It has been in private hands and unseen by the public for more than 100 years and will go on show at the Royal Pavilion soon after it arrives in the city.

The Chain Pier, Brighton, by JMW Turner, c1824. Copyright Christie's Images, 2012

The painting depicts Brighton from the sea, with the newly constructed chain pier on the right of the picture and the Royal Pavilion at the centre. It will be the star attraction of a new exhibition at the historic royal palace in 2013.

You can read the press release here.

For the past two weeks (ending Saturday 4 February) the Royal Pavilion has been closed to the public to allow essential maintenance work to take place. Usually open 7 days a week all year round, the closed period allows for more significant work to be made in public areas to ensure that future visitors enjoy the best experience possible. Behind the scenes, staff have been working hard cleaning upholstery, furniture, and the beautiful murals on the Music Room walls. Conservation staff are working in the public display rooms including the Octagon Hall and Music Room Gallery, and the restoration of the hand painted glass laylights in the South Gallery on the upper floor is being completed, after their meticulous repainting by the Glass Conservator.

These essential improvements are being made possible by external funding secured by the Royal Pavilion to help carry out these works.

We look forward to reopening our (newly painted!) doors and welcoming visitors again from Saturday 4 February. For the staff here at the Royal Pavilion & Museums there will be an added touch of excitement in the air about what the next twelve months has to offer thanks to the funding announcements of last week!

Janita Bagshawe (and staff),
Head of Royal Pavilion and Museums

Image of the Month — Hotel Metropole by Robert Goff, c1895

Hotel Metropole, c1895, by Robert Charles Goff (FA209267)

This atmospheric image is an etching from the early 1890s showing Brighton’s Metropole Hotel at dusk. Gas lights line the promenade and the bridge to the West Pier, creating silhouettes of people enjoying an evening walk. Look closely and you can see horse-drawn carriages on the right, perhaps waiting for business from the large hotels on the seafront. The West Pier is just visible on the left. It is one of many etchings of Brighton, Hove and Sussex by Robert Charles Goff, an artist based in Hove for many years.

Goff enjoyed travelling and led a deliberately peripatetic life, finding subjects for his art in Britain, Italy, Egypt, Japan, Holland and Switzerland. His etchings and paintings earned him an international reputation during his lifetime. He had two distinct careers: born to Irish parents in 1837 he became a professional soldier before he was 18. By the early 1870s he had risen to the rank of honorary Colonel. He retired from the army in 1878, married the same year, and settled in London for a while, before spending long periods in Hove, Italy and Switzerland. From around 1892 he lived in 15 Adelaide Crescent, and later took up a studio in Holland Road. Goff left Hove in 1903 to live in Florence but kept his studio here until the end of his life.

At some point in the twentieth century, Brighton Museum acquired the contents of his studio. This gives a remarkable insight into the work and working methods of an etcher in the late 19th and early 20th century. A selection of his work, including many local views, will be on display in a new exhibition in the Prints and Drawings Gallery of Brighton Museum & Art Gallery from 29 November 2011 until 29 April 2012.

Alexandra Loske, Researcher and Guide at the Royal Pavilion